Baking, broiling, blindingly bright, blistering sun,

super scorching, sweltering, sizzling sand

the kabob that is my body searing, skewered

Deceptively blue skies devoid of any deliverance

no cavalry of clouds coming to convey compassion

Rising balloon-like bubbles of hot air

causing distant objects to ripple and dance

shimmering in the atmospheric boil

Falling to my knees, I detect in the distance

glimmering patches of blue and green—Mirage!

A maniacal mime of molten mockery

deriding my dreadful demise




Mark Toney © 2019

There is a bay on the Oregon coast,
Shaped like a scallop shell
And ringed by rounded stones.
And from the darkening sky
Droop billows of blue and gray
Hanging and lit like Chinese lanterns.
Humans in the damp Northwest
Appear to drip from the clouds
In rain-washed colors
Of blue and violet,
Whose tattered clothes
Are softened and soaked
From ragged wool into rich satin.
Still others bask on shores
Of pebbles rolled by the sea,
Bone white and cloud-gray.
Down and up, down again
The light rays vault,
Painting bipeds into the land.
There are no reflections
But rather water in the air,
Looking like rain
Even on cloudless days.
Their world is saturated
Like the scarlet gowns
Of Waterhouse’s Ariadne
And the ponds of Monet,
Green as the British Isles,
Blue as the Aegean
And white as the Pantheon ruins .
Much like an ancient tomb,
The majesty of mortal lives
Commemorated in stone
Is here splashed in the air
And in every forest or cliff.
Hushing people into silence,
So they conduct the most
Serious customs in whispers,
Knowing how voices echo along
Water droplets
And mountain shadows.

A fisher boy sits on a dock
Crouched and humble he kisses his lure with a blasphemous sensuality
His back in the sun bakes like bread
As the mile long hands of light tenderly tan his hide

His hands reel me in from my endless pit
translucent strings of boy saliva and fishers thread, weaves beneath my flesh

I wish to be like him
Sleeveless
Sexless
And surrounded by wet

A hook reaches me, propelled by his eyes into mine

Who are you to catch me like this??
his finger in my mouth, shaped like a sickle

I want to go back in my home

Spaced between sky and clouds and their liquid counterpart

I look to the right and see nothing anymore
The left holds me not
A dog barks at nothing and so do I

                      * * *

I look back to the ground, to my own body and my own ***.

The fisher-boy now distant and unknowing casts his hook.
He does not look at me.

I call up my friend later, and send them a picture of a lake
And say with yearning in my heart

“Just look how big the water is”

A dark rainy day
...light follows
As mortal clouds wash their sins away.