I curse like a drunken sailor with a stubbed toe and an eye full of Tabasco.

He can curse up a storm
make a sailor blush
Foul blue language
spewed out in a gush
Could strip paint clean
off a battleship
Exponentially worse if
you give him any lip
Rambling in sincerity's guise
but his worst 4-letter words
are all his LIES




© 2020 by Mark Toney. All rights reserved.

The chicken baulked, "Phaulk!"
Before Latin chose to roll around,
And the "Librarian's sound, it"
Has been through pursed lips
Oedipus was clapping cheeks,
Long before Middle English clapped any,
When lions and tigers and bares
Were the prime predators
Even in The Garden,
Snake said as,
As snakes say as,
Where the language of choice I know,
Not to be English.
And if your dainty, sky-locked eyes soul and mind,
Remain unfazed by kid killers, or rampant rapers,
But try to censor my ******* ****?

for what it’s worth,
we both didn’t know what we needed

i think
we relied on smoke to make up for the silence
we couldn’t fill

fingertips touching, flickering like the fire from
your lighter
gazes fluid like gasoline, waiting for a light to set it afire

but where the edges aren’t collapsing,
we’re still whole
flowing into each other,
falling back into place

we’re not looking to burn the night away
even in our self-destroying core,
we’re still looking to feel something,
everything


**** falling apart, that’s not,
that’s not us

we’re not breaking, not leaving
just looking for a space to stay

we don’t breathe fuel, and even on the cruelest days
we know how to keep each other warm

so i guess when we extinguished ourselves,
in our own self-doubt,
fell apart,
that’s when we realized that,
for what it’s worth, what we needed
most,
was each other