Is there something I’ve forgotten?
Something left undone?
Something that I should have known?
Something, or some one?
Is there something I’ve not taken?
Something I should leave?
Something I should throw away?
Or that I should retrieve?
Is there something I have overlooked?
Something to ignore?
Something I forgot to love?
Or something to deplore?
Is there something I forgot to show?
Someone I should be?
For, now I stand so close to you,
There’s nothing else I see.
Bryson Thomas
Fall
Rosebuds
Are as fat red
Nuns wrapping
Their habits
Against the
Cold
Bryson Thomas
Stalagmites and stalactites
In a limestone mind.
No movement, bar when
Worry comes spelunking
Through the cavern,
A luminous beast
Puffing on the good thoughts
And flicking butts into
The choked stream of consciousness.
Eons from now, the ceiling will
Sink under the weight of the sky
And light will play in the puddle.
But now?
Now, it’s too dark to see the cracks.
Bryson Thomas
Pa pours strong ale
With weak arms
Ma’s road-map hands
Draw elixir from the
Free-range hair atop
Free-range kids
Dodging tired stares of
Full-shirted Aunts, as
Uncles palanquin mounds
Of fire-basted love
To the plates and
Drool-tongued dogs
Taste the warm air
With cold opportunism.
Sunday’s football briefly
Upstages, then carries
On, mostly unwatched
From its wall, one of four
Upon which the
Slouched roof rests.
The barn-board table
Takes all of these things,
Keeping them quietly
Amidst its rings.
Bryson Thomas
Printface Type is an insidious brat,
Deceptive, malicious, a bureaucrat,
Masking ill-thought thinks,
And bad word chooses,
Within a tidy black suit, and
Polished shooses.
Bryson Thomas
Rust-stained shorts in a saddle
Spear grass cracking dry jokes to bored locusts
Creek-bound turtles paddle
In a tannin-rooted creek, coloured syrup
A roo-leather boot in a stirrup.
This.
Farmlife remembered, clear
Of gut-clenching fear
Of drought and fly-blown sheep.
Nay.
Just sweet-wafer recalls, in the main,
Horse-scents, country lanes.
Bryson Thomas
Sometimes, when I pull on my socks,
My grown-man’s brain winds back the clocks,
And I recall,
Being small,
When they went up over my knees,
And the Amazon still had some trees.
Bryson Thomas
As I tread its spongy auditorium floor,
The forest lends gentle ovation
To the breeze dancing on its leaves,
Or perhaps in quiet celebration
Of my passing.
For there are no seats for such as me,
Among these rows.
Muted, coruscating sunlight ushers me out,
Before the act is over.
Bryson Thomas
My mind is but
A tiny Water Skipper
Skating the meniscus of your
Intellectual deep.
Such plunges elude me,
But maybe my fleetings tickle you,
Now and then.
Bryson Thomas
Minds entwined, two breaths embrace,
Respiring for the heart,
Cool hands weigh a cradled face,
Lips, a wisp apart,
Eyelashes, feathers to the skin,
That delve a lifetime mark,
And there they draw each other in,
United in the dark.
Bryson Thomas
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