All these vultures hovering around their prey:
Three golden prizes
Who will get there first?
Cue David Attenborough on commentary!
Coupled and single lions
Prowling about
Waiting for the chance of food and drink.

That coffee takes ages.
Coffee?
Yes, for this is my local
And my pack and I
Are thoroughly enjoying our ale
With our lovely lunches
Served to us by beautiful barmaids.

Those golden prizes are the three front tables
From where you can see the golden sand:
On a beach
Dotted with distant tiny people
As some frolic in the estuary waves
On paddle boards,
Basking in the glorious sun.
Time for another pint.

Paul Butters

© PB 2\9\23.

Swaying,
Heat pressing into my skin,
The same winged creature circling my face and then landing on the very tip of my nose,
Air thick like a milkshake.
When the rain comes,
Landing with a thud,
Like a bag of sand dropping from the roof of a house,
The animals can breathe,
I can breathe,
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh,
Even the crickets let out a sigh,
Pounding like a drum,
Pounding like the same dream every ******* night,
The capybaras and wooly monkeys with their hunched shoulders and squinting eyes,
Let the branches and leaves heave around them,
Verdant,
And flashing,
A globe of bubblegum,
The rain always comes.

Our little collegetown is a jungle tonight,
with the deafening, staticky drone of locusts constituting
its own kind of warm gravity,

sidewalks drenched and carpeted with a rotting mess of
blood-red maple leaves, and

thousands of spiders the size of human eyes, glaring
down from the dead-center of their backlit, dew-drizzled webs.

I always thought that I'd never be loved enough.

In crafting anthologies on the angles of my favorite noses,
I pretended I didn't want someone else’s protractor on my own,
and prepared for a life sentence as the uncharted geometer,
the invisible painter, the secret poet,
the immortalizer, rather than the immortalized.

I find myself, now, to be a poem––
your poem––
etched into the curvature of your jungle-green eyes.

But walking home in our jungle tonight, I feel sick.
Your ears distort my hesitant laughter
into a dissonant, deafening euphoria, and

when I lay my head on your heated chest, I can feel the blood
gushing underneath your skin,
surging through your veins, storming, drowning
you, and I feel sick because all this love you pump for me--
all this love you are drowning in--
only rots in my guilty stomach...

When my memory is watching me
with her thousands of glaring eyes,
she will always mourn the breaking of a beautiful heart.

"MIXED FEELING."

The saints
are always
crook: why.?
They have
none tolerance for *******. Yes
believe me
they don't,
even Christ
Jesus didn't. Nonetheless
though He
quoted "When your
right cheek
is slapped turn
the left side."
that's no *******, it's
what make
a Saint. But
He hesitated
not to chase the Merchandise
out the
Lord's temple.
******* are: like, sometimes where positivity is
anticipated finding negativity there
right is
the biggest
******* in the
whole wide
crazy world.
Full of
crazy thangz, crazy people living crazy lifestyle. Wide
life, out
the jungle,
homicides, massacre Wonder why we breathing, when
we living to
die. Or I'm
high? (Sigh)
when will the
world halt being ridiculously
crazy. Said
they he's
zany. Plagued
the sages
mad. However
sages are the
last hopes
to heal
the world.
Corona-virus
army, enemy
agent of segregation. What right have
you to black
me, who am
I to white
a brother. ?
When we
looked just
the same, being  humanbeing.
How to become
human, Auth-positive thinking faculty, creativity,
optimism build only, nothang but
possibility. Innovation, inspiration,
motivation.
Here rode
time on the
road to glory
is there any future anywhere.? if
there ever is
a time for
everythang
le' me use
mine now. I
was told
the future
is now, I
wanna live
it unfolding
my pages
stepping the
stair cases,
roller coaster,
fortune searching
I
ride slow,
nonetheless
I gets heading
I should rush
not, yet
on steadily.
#C9_fm

concrete jungle heat
suffocating cityscape
~ bare feet loving grass






Mark Toney © 2021

Take a trip inside of my mind
But be warned that there are worse things than
Lions, and tigers, and bears.
The monsters that guard this jungle mind
Aren’t soft and nice when they choose to be
They are horrifying,
Bloodthirsty,
Larger than life,
All sharp teeth and horns.

Take a trip inside of my mind
But know it’s easy to get lost in
Mazes, and illusions, and metaphors.
The jigsaws aren’t easy 50 piece puzzles
They are thousands of broken words
With no guarantee
That they will fit together
Nicely-
Or at all

Take a trip inside of my mind
But remember that you will find memories
Broken, and wonderful, and messy.
These recollections will tell you who I am
They say where I came from,
fears,
dreams,
hopes,
And lack there-of.

Take a trip inside of my mind
But it isn’t overly charming between the
Monstrosities, and mazes, and memories.
If beautiful is what you were searching for
You can only find it in glimpses between
Sharp teeth,  
Broken words,
Lost hope,
And jumbled jungle vines.

So if you decide
To take a trip inside of my mind,
Take note of the
Beautiful disaster,
Organized chaos,
And sweet sorrow.
Be gentle,
Be cautious,
Be aware.
Because this is one mangled mind,
And you are one of the first
To go inside.

The thorns that ***** your heel when you walk into the jungle unsure

The wild monsters that appear in your nightmares float around

The trees, like scarecrows appear like scars on your neck

There is a war inside your head

Reignite your flames, phoenix

And reincarnate