driving home to you
unfortunately I died
~ text said I love you


driving and texting
new car for graduation
~ hi guys guess what I'm


busy city streets
need to text spouse I'll be late
~ pedestrian hit


can't wait to see you
didn't see car stopped ahead
~ text never sent




© 2020 Mark Toney.  All rights reserved.

https://www.stoptextsstopwrecks.org

We stop our faithful car
Halfway between both
National parks
Because the scenery
Was too gorgeous
To quickly forget.
We sit down near a cow fence
And you pick me a flower
And place it in my hair,
And I can tell everything
With you is about the scenery,
The message, the emotion.
You’re an artist that never
Turns away from the canvas.
You never turn off the appreciation,
The evaluating, the creating,
And I want to kiss your
Tired eyes,
The ones that must dream
Exhausting things
All night and day,
And now there are tears in my eyes
And they sting
And it’s because I realize
How draining it must be
To be so beautiful.
You make me realize
How similar we are,
I see myself in you.
Everything to me is poetry.
All the double meaning
And metaphor
Gives me context, gives me life,
Helps me make connections.
It drives me absolutely insane,
Being an artist at heart,
And then in a twist of fate,
That turns out to be
Exactly what you want.
Now we’re weeping
On the side of the road
Somewhere in Idaho,
And you love me,
And I know it,
And it hits me hard for the first time,
And I’m an artist
So I want to feel it all.
And we talk about love
And our fears about death,
How we’ll always be artists -
Me, the mad one, and you,
The sad one, and we laugh,
With tears of every emotion,
And we want to drink them up,
And it’s like time doesn’t exist
On this abandoned highway road
With the unforgettable view,
The unforgettable me,
And the unforgettable you.

ahead, red eyes glare through the dark
as overhead, bulbs burn brighter than any star.
great wheels roll and rumble, beneath and behind
and the rattle and scrape of a hundred gears pulses away,
relentless; unaware and unmoved
by your restless writhing.

behind your eyes, that broken mind
and bleeding heart beat on and on
in stubborn time with some pretense of strength,
but that's gone too, you fear.

outside, the frozen tundra sifts
from white, to blue, to grey,
until the austere sky reflects
and swallows whole its solid self,
leaving wisps of winter dancing in its wake.

how long now til familiarity fades
and you might breathe some novel air and smile
at the shapes and sounds of things you've never seen?
those echoes everlasting might soon die,
if only you could feel some promise below your feet;
the world with all its weightlessness pushing back
from underneath.

Just in case

What if Eve, as an easy lable for YMRCA, were

the first wombed man with wit to make her will known,
vocally?

What if she could sing, and smile, wink and
blink and look away,

coy, from the crib.

She steals, so'ld say the tales, her daddy's heart, but not so fast

this is, say 120 KYA, as current model mortals mark time
since most recent common mom... walked balanced, upright...
I bet she could dance and sing... but
some reason or another, now

no offspring of any mom alive when YMRCA walked, walks now.

Not upright, ya sher... maybe eve was the only wombed man.

What if, any of that, but this is a strue as we may know...

all construed facts point to life being
struely
not as simple as a boom... though there are ways to end it,
as we say we well know,

we've seen the cancers... mental deranging during mind wandering,

we have heard the stories,
Hydes who remained,

but only Post-mortal Marvel has myths where Hyde is the happy side.

Silly, I would love to have friends.
But no stupid people, none un willing to use a word of the day
to escape a bout of ignorant rage

-- Brubeck, Sonny... yeah like the Sundance Kid's prison flick,
-- but Sonny was a first gen Jesus Freak,
with one of those, at will, eididic memory's.
He also owned the first digital watch I ever saw. I thought he was rich.

In a rage, Sonny once screamed in my hearing,

GOD WHY MUST THERE BE OTHER PEOPLE?

as orderly types were taking him, strapped to gurney,
to Camarillo State Hospital,
a truly beautiful place for solitary rememberence
of everything
you ever said or did. Like, the window of your soul

become the big screen, with no body projected there...

all around me everyone is not there...

then I see, I guess, this is a way that prayer was remembered as

Sonny slowly rose to re
ify a present with other people in it, but masked.