girl alone

baptism 11:34 am sunday. you can baptise a person, but not a cat.....

baptism, grand cayman, cayman islands, tony walton

(cats don't even go for the sprinkling baptism, I tried it)

walking towards a cliff at 2:43 pm

bluff, cayman brac, cayman islands. the weird thing is:  to the left of the girl on the left{follow from her left elbow} the image of a man in khaki shorts, blue shirt, and red hat appears, stooped over.

Today’s Agenda: Seize the Day | Tony Walton

I want that thing that Lord Bryon
panted after, coiled around my ribs
and pumping, blood rushing to that
warm glow of oblivion.

I'll plot like Macbeth with my trophy wife,
ruby crown, twisted knees at my feet,
wading through power, til it's over my head.

Before me lies the shoreless seas that
Columbus saw, into that jagged wind,
no sunlight reached, punching those
hard sea caps westward.

I've practiced that cashy swagger of
Gatsby. Looking down through long French
windows from the leafy hills above.
Society page, big house - here's my
check.

This is how to live! - blazing across
Van Gogh's Starry Night, swimming in the
swirls and brushstrokes of that hot orange moon
and those boiling stars.

But a light afternoon wind caresses my nuzzled
bottle of beer whistling a soft dove call across the
City Park overhung with white oak trees and
coins of sunlight and

I take a swig and lie back in the sun, tracing a smile,
so grateful I called in sick today.

Copyright 2014 Moonkind Press | All Rights Reserved  
The Olentangy Review is a literary website and magazine

London 2009

As I turn left off Oxford Street
cloaked in a low sky and shuffling
along with the other furrowed brows

I search for the accents of my youth
“Tomato” or “Tomahto” or “Tomata.”
“Aunt” or “Ant” or “Auntie”

Punching my cold fists into a
Harrods jacket I enter the tube,

shortly reaching a grey gray
station and see the pub with an
old fashioned clock against the
familiar liquored mirror,

damn, it’s way past our meeting time,
and
am I at the right place?

I really could go for
comfort food now, we need this

Connection

“Buffalo Wings?” Or is it “Fish and Chips?”
Maybe “Saltfish?”

Which of these do I want?
Eh, it’s too late for such a search.

A sudden hiss of wind
angrily flaps my jacket, and
a raindrop

taps my shoulder—
as a stranger does when they have
wandered too far and need
direction.

The rain falls.
The sun falls.
The fog falls.
The days fall from the harboring arms of mothers.

I walk alongside the parceled flats,
pausing at a low bridge and look out at
the bruised dusk of the Old World
as the wind swings my bag like a beacon
against the cold.

Oh, come now - and dance with me
Caribbean.

Published in The Storyteller Magazine, Spring 2014, “11 months in London”

Tony Walton

The Dark Matter of Graduation Day

The Dark Matter of Graduation Day

Dark Matter - noun - Nonluminous material in the universe not seen by the naked eye.

Graduation day –

and later (with fake ID) that night:
A hotel room, booze, trilled song!

You raid the hotel room liquor bar!

Some years later

shuffling towards a cornered cubicle
drooped in your ergonomic chair with
caffeine to replace blood and computer to
displace brain, there under the slow tick of
the clock metering a motionless march.

A jet lag
hotel rooms of icy paintings staring over
nothing,
delving days with stormy eyes
searching

a sea of fleshy faces and plastic convention
name tags of lives mapped and wrapped,
stomachs filled with free shrimp,
clutching drink tokens ("Good for One Drink!")

soon they are slumped on the bar - pale and
pot bellied, like cadavers dissected in medical school.

You retreat to the 12th floor and remember
your hero, Siddhartha Buddha, who it
has been said -during his brief ascetic phase,

working in a pottery production shop, walked off
the job one day - "Thank God I'm outta that place,"
he murmered and then smiled - to no one in particular.

You raid the hotel room liquor bar, then

lay back on hard springs and
await the unshaven jaws of dawn. 


Published by Eastlit Magazine
Editor’s Note on Tony Walton Poetry