comet Swift-Tuttle
Perseid meteor show
shooting star wishes






Mark Toney ©️ 2023

I wonder what I am to do with my life.
Then, I see meteors.

Outside with tea and blankets:
a Fortress against the

August cold.

And so begins another typically English evening.

night is marching,
marching on and

unusually

we are not glued to our phones
nor the daily grind.

we catch a handful of

Shooting Stars

and find that this is an addictive occupation.

One moment I wished I could drape my room with starry waterfalls
but then considered how they would

dull
      
       and
            
            darken

if I breathed too deeply in my sleep.

(a subconscious effort to absorb some starlight into my clotting veins.)

So leave me now under the
Flaming Sky and all its anger.

Leave me alone so that I may fall asleep,
at last.

I have an appointment with the moon about my dulling temperament.

The stars have sworn to let down a

r
o
p
e

l
a
d
d
e
r

my own Stairway to Heaven.

So rip my heart out,
let my arteries unwind.

Haul me to heaven with my umbilical cord.

There I cling to the back of a comet
and hurtle through space
alive at last and full of stars
until the nausea takes hold

and puts me to bed.

It is summer and soon the Perseid showers
I have gone from my desert home
I wander far from crowded towns
my feet in grassy, bee clover
deep summer, all daisy flowered
green leaves, wild blackberries
await the August sun fire.

Here amid the slowing of mars retrograde
of my love returning home too late
no long goodbye, only the weight
I watch oceans of seaweed sway
at night the phosphorescence
the lonesome of sea stars trailing.

Beyond the oak and silver hills the day nestled in
soft breeze about the land, lily white moon
to light a sky of sparkling starry flowers
Whispers woke the sleeping one
and spoke the night to follow
Owl flew ever high  
beneath a Perseid's shower
A dream - you awoke
to watch shooting stars fall quiet
passed your window
til morning came with birds and stars
peace upon your pillow

I am 14.6 billion years old. I am energy traveling at the speed of light,
I am a single proton with one orbiting electron, perfectly balanced
With quarks and bosons and higgs inside
And pieces of matter yet to be understood by man.
I am every star, every atom of Hydrogen fused to Helium.
I am a massive object of molten rock, cooling and fusing.
I am trilobite knee and dinosaur tooth,
Wooly mammoth hair fiber.
I am Permian Extinction, I am Ice Age, I am all surviving species.
I am most distant brothers of man, I am first language and first songs.
I am Bubonic Plague and Death
And life out of new molecules from old.
I am the Industrial Revolution,
I am Depression and Holocaust and oppression.
I am titanium and assembly line.
I am Perseid meteor shower and Halley ’s Comet.
I am every black hole,
Inside, another whole universe of me.

I am seconds young, and I have much to learn of
The multitudes of the universe, myself.

It came softly warm, mist of fragrant showers
garden flowers of parchment petals
drank of sun, of moon, of rain
silent the Perseid showers
a falling sea of rain
sparkling in the night sky.

It came softly warm, mist of fragrant showers
bright flowers of parchment petals, drank
of sun, of moon, of rain
a world glistening, silent
as perseid shooting stars
falling from a sea
of heavens

Mehmet II burns
in my hand
while we hunt
the Perseid shower
under a waxing
gibbous moon's white
sea broadcast.
Prosecco disappears
inside us. You pick
deck tomatoes, and
conversation gets
interesting by your knee.

The night doesn't end
so much as folds and
folds again, with us
by the very center.
Sinuous silk birds
crease into sheets
just beyond your
delectable ear.
Your breath
a dark ribbon,
a flower of steam,
a door I step through
on my way to the
kingdom of hands.