I hope you will be there with me
In the long winter without spring:
Ever green, star bright, true north.

The pines bent under the weight of snow
Are glad of the long-awaited rest.
We will tuck beneath white sheets.
My roots tangle with yours -
Lean your limbs on me,
I will hold your hand.

I will love you as you cough,
I will love you as you fall,
I will love you in all sickness.

In our autumn we will gather harvest,
A wealth of sweet golden years well-ripened.
When the storms come
And night darkens our hearth,
I will keep a fire for you.
My black coal-heart burns slow.

Because you are mine.
Because I belong to you.
Because when we return to earth
And become good loam,
The flowers that grow on me
Will bloom for you.

You know it all,
but you just don't know.
I knew it too,
at least I thought so.

it's dusty, i swipe grime off my skin
my memories piled up in stacks of
knick-knacks, yellowed notebook pages,
and drawings from when i was twelve
i haven't cleaned my room in a year
too scared, anxious
to touch anything
the fear of breaking my fragile sense of identity
that i've clung to

it's desperate, lonely
sleeping in a dusty room

i wipe the sweat from my forehead
cobwebs weave through my strands
clinging in clumps as i
rummage through my belongings

i hadn't seen these things in a while
remnants of when i was
happier, even though i said i wasn't

i'm a year older again
and soon i will be years and years older
and i will leave this room behind

for now,
as i stay for
a little bit longer
let me revert back into
the child i was.

You are so young and beautiful
I feel so old and tired
You pick me up in your arms
And suddenly I forget my age :)

20th birthday
I've forgotten when to breathe
and my mother is my only friend
the last one yet to leave.
I am feverish skin
to March's first chill breeze
tripping over, again and again
afraid to pull my hands from my sleeve.
20 years old now
a full on woman in sheep's clothing
but I don't know how
to live life without loathing
love, and bills, and here and now's.
Myself, pulling on a window that's already closing.

Time moves
forward
Breakfast
ordered
Sunrise reveals
a new day
People scurry
anxious worry
Obstacles
get in
the way

Memories
measured
Guarded,
treasured
In the midst
of the dawn's
hopeful rays
Seasons changing
rearranging
Minds in
perpetual daze

No time for
caution too
close to the
auction
Our lot numbers
soon will display
Our main
distraction
too close to
the action
"Going once!
Going twice!"
as they say ...

We've arrived
at the end of
the day ...

Time to
finish our
final melee ...

Contemplating our
Fabergé egg





Mark Toney ©️ 2023

~
lost library books
and broken lunchbox thermos,
her childhood under a forgotten
leaf on a pond.
she's attracted to the sound
of the breeze through her hair,
inner-city birds recommending
she listen with her head underwater,
to experience it as a fish might.
this is inescapable.

blood roses in the snow,
her unemployed martyred
fingers in the factory.
the manufactured years go by
at a price too great to recover from.
for every flash of beauty,
there is a hint of anger; a dash of violence.
this is inescapable.

her sleep-flower recital
in a dew-swathed spring morning hospital,
some kind of faraway pink funeral for
dead trees and traffic lights.
treasure impaired clouds capture
an isolated moment in time.
perhaps several moments.
perhaps several parts of the same moment.
this is inescapable.
~

If wishes were prayer

Saturday, January 28, 2023
12:06 PM

let me go wry or right, let me
be as one you witnessed falling,

and for that breath, believed,
wishes work as wonders do,
with very little help from things
thought truer.

I think of you, reading words I write,
I thrill a little at the intimate point of wedom,
the thoughts I fit to words, and sent into the
other
state, to wait, and wait, and become too tiny
to make any change not made,

at the time, when we touched as words do,
and held the hope that words hold.

Being as an event, we be apart, we be all one.

And we cannot unbecome.
----------------------

Inner being, being in me, other than I,
guide me, today.

I am willing to be useful, I do not have an aim,
I hold no hope of fame and recognosis,
I live to become a memory, at best,
and less than a memory, eventually.

I lie if I deny the joy I take from any sign, I see
you, thinking whys atop wherefores and how comes,

sudden otherness
occuring in a wedom framed by grand imaginations,

a new form of governing mankind, a new reason
to be defensive…

earnestly contending for pride of place, top of the pile.
------------------------

My Saturday, as all my days are now,
a day of rest,
a day of being after growing old enough, not, too;
but plenty old enough,
to reason with war,
face on face, as if, war
and I were forces of the same sort.

Ideas, grand wads of thought threads, spun
from times last chances,
grabbed with all I have to hold, huggishly,
for comforting knowledge,

I am not alone in wishing prayers were left being,
answered on reception, now, then, left being
alright. Amen.
-----------

It is in the thousands, tens of thousands, even,
Even, everish, same old, same
balanced on the upright,
walking,
past any hope to become one of those, the greats,

not even a billion to one, the odds of me becoming,
by the time I survived, the odds were even worse,
not a chance.

I bet, I said, I bet I won,
my race already run, by now, you know,
the results are pending
review,
and then I died,
and the results were these remaining
lines you take in,
as though you heard me talking, and thought
you might
over hear and know, all the songs of us, are about you.

The most self-centered man I ever met, said
my therapist to me, as I spun dervishly on my point.
------------------