...and words still come to my fingertips as i undress you in spirit.

almost-friend, hold me tight and love me true / stare me down, see me as i am: disquieted, patinaed and accustomed to pockets / loose change, a worn copper penny; incoherent, the thrill and lurching sensation of gravity / blooming in my core as i die in my dreams; afraid, for all that word means / of the figs that lie waiting on the branches ahead / ample and pregnant with sweet-rot possibility;

we will labor, singing of light and covalence / until dusk is shorn of its gloomy nightgown / staving off the cold with what tea, what liquid light / the yielding sun could gift our wide eyes: / just ask, darling almost-friend / and i will provide, because…

you are a fawn, limber and knobby-kneed / and i am but a stranger waxing melancholy in stolen glances from afar / as you come into focus in my wood / drinking from my fountains and eating from my briars / leaving me to wonder, “how could i not love such a soul, astute and gentle as it is?” / and so i offer you food and drink because i have nothing else / you could be in want of;

but such things are not for me to behold / and i fear that you will molt your coat as seasons change / the down behind your ears yielding to antlers sprouting like milk teeth from gums / tendering tender for tenacious, grace for gruesome / that you will forget the hands that have proffered to you / sustenance and healing in your darkest hours / for to see others consume satisfies my hunger / to see others delight, my vicarious feast;

in my mind’s eye, you are unclothed and angelic / even with the ophidian basin of your back pressed flat against the tiles of a scalding shower / even with tears ravaging your honest face / here, the masquerade, the spectacle and circumstance, ends / because your rapture will betray your guilt / and we will summit new zeniths hand-in-hand / be baptized, enthralled in the fresh, algid, restless oceans we called forth from the far reaches of our globe / with nothing more than the labyrinth-etched palms of our hands / charting the great floods of yesterday / inking them into the annuls of a friendship (nothing more) for the ages;

celebrate holier mysteries in the anamnesis of that day / we rested upon sand fine as powder, crusted on our knees and elbows / as the ark of our covenant neaped and sprang with cyclical certainty / almost-friend, smile me but one more drowsy floodgate grin / rest your raven-crowned head upon my bare chest / laying in that tender way for eternity / and never again will i ask that wretched question of you: "are you with me?"

no, darling almost-friend: forget me not / because fair weather or poor, my love will remain / echoing truer far and far more sweet / than the oblivious whisper of a forest brook / or the stentorian thundering of an ocean reclaiming what once belonged to it / to know that i am cared for even a fraction of how i care for you is an honor/ and as but a stranger gazing from afar, i promise you this: i will far sooner take myself for granted than you / even should no tea remain to keep us warm, i will hold you till the storm passes / and forever will your name be engraved herein.

Glass-winged moths hover,
opal figs drip milky dusk,
stars hum, ripe with light.

With my five iron
I drive fallen, raw figs
Across the yard

picking ripe plump figs
each one marred by pecking holes
~ pleasantly plump birds






Mark Toney © 2021

The calm was worn out of her.
For decades, jesus ****, ---tens… of … *******...years,
She had abstained, held back, postponed and missed out.
Somehow she had become the Mother Theresa of kind gestures,
The one who helped
And healed
And hovered
And hoped,
Oh god how she had hoped,
Until standing in front of the mirror
In Bloomingdale’s basement,
Her lips chapped and her mouth parched,
In some obscene sort of spiritual dehydration,
A pre- catatonia,
And sensing the up swell of a hurricane of self-hatred,
So overwhelming
That it numbed her fingers and made her nose itch,
In this instant she could not tell
Which side of the mirror she was on.
Was she looking at herself or was she the reflection of herself.

In this messiah moment,
When a massively disinterested sales clerk asked her
If she had found what she was looking for,
In this exchange with a stranger with a name tag on,
Her life stopped.
And for the first time ever she responded, yes I think I have.

So she bought the dress which showed way too much cleavage,
Wore it out of the store and into an uptown bar,
Where she surveyed the 5 o’clock crowd,
Found the face of a man she had never seen before
And walked up to this stranger in a suit
And offered to buy him a drink.
He accepted, Jesus was it really that easy.
They exchanged maybe twenty words,
She knew exactly what she wanted,
And she shivered twice,
At the end of a dark corridor,
Bent over a cold aluminum beer keg,
A fistful of her hair in his hands,
Her ******* wrapped round one ankle,
The dress now a sash about her waist.

And so her secret life began.
She didn't tell her husband,
Or her priest,
She took a part time gig
At a massage parlour with the happiest of endings,
And she felt powerful and a little insane.
Sitting at Sunday dinner, smiling and engaged,
She wondered if she was a sociopath, a closet ******,
How could deception and promiscuity
Bring her happiness,
Where honour and fealty had failed.

She worried about others finding out,
It would destroy her life if they did,
Disgrace was a terminal disease at her stage,
Her heart would panic each time she entered the salon,
Each time she had to parade nearly naked,
In front of a new client,
The moment before she entered the room,
Would she know the man on the other side of that door,
Was the risk worth it.

Time after time she decided it was.