Seasons Poem by Alto Lee Thomas, Jr.

Spring

From nothingness in dreamless slumber
Three-quarter-year devoid of light.
Thought wakens spawned from gurgled voices
Whispered … yet … similar sources,
Familiar...familial…ancestral…filial

Each voice imparts some ancient wisdom.
In satchels packed for journey’s end
Surrounded by a genteel throbbing
Slowly drums the tympanum…
D’dum, … d’dum, …d’dum, …d’dum.

Upward…, onward, rhythm driven.
Compelled by roiling dream to motion.
No longer pleased in shapeless mass
Too cumbersome … but more …at last.

The genesis of consciousness.
Attracted to the sucking dawn
Expelled into its vacuous yawn
Pushed and pulled forth from the night
I flow on dreams into the light
…on crimson streams into the light.


Summer


Bursting from a bomb’s blast,
A cacophonous ‘clap-crash,
Vacuous pupils conceal the flame
All honed and manly;
A red-boned dandy
Glass poured over a sinuous frame

He’s a child of the cyber age
Portal to the next page.
The God’s-heaven-truth.
Immunized to pestilence;
Oblivious to consequence
The epitome of youth

A syndicate of symbionts
Feeds the seething need in him
He struts in the accompaniment
Of quintessential sycophants

But ethereal spirits reel in him
Hear growls and rumbles feed within
The summer sun completes in him
In furtherance of the Master’s plan
The time to seed the fertile land.
The bounty from this time of green
Is better than it’s ever been.


Autumn

Landscapes coolly morph, from pallets of pale emerald, to fading jades.
Leaves drizzle down in lazy swirls that pile featherlike in musky heaps of red and rusty hues.
Lovers coupled in voluptuous rituals as ancient and ardent as those that roused mankind in primal days.
Chilling winds cloaked heated folds kept warm and supple; while growing anxious to repay their nature’s dues.

At first sight and, unlike other nights; the frosted air was inflamed by pheromones and candlelight.
Like magic, all of life’s most sumptuous wonders opened to their hungry hearts and starving eyes.
Neither was long distracted by discretion, nor shackled by the temperance of whim.
For the consequence of certainty commanded, … that he was meant for her … And she for him.

First touch, a subtle brush, want made mad by accident;
All others were made with the intent to incense.
Tongues deftly trace arcing hips and lit fuels that led their flesh to mesh.
Tensions' crescendo lent friction to tempo; heart and body in raucous chorus of panting breaths.

Unsure of the perfection that the raging fire affords;
Unused to the direction that their quaking thighs explored.
Sparks explode, through hollow limb,
In shocks that echoed deep within.

They slump and are, for now, content;
For as he entered her … she entered him.


Winter


Life's essence ebbs in metered spews of frosted broken breaths;
He trudges up that final slope, exposed in mottled flesh.
Failing thew and grinding bones, this winded rusted train,
Masks agony in coats of hopes; his body’s last betrayal.

Observe his graying temples once coated black and thick
See clouding eyes as pristine mind succumbs to dementia’s tricks.
Though plagued by those regrets that rush on frozen northern winds
He prays to be forgiven his mortal and immortal sins.

Scabs encrusts his feeble heart plucked beating, rent, and worn,
By seething greedy leeches eating down to thinning bone.
Exhaustion wraps his wasting face and stamps with gentle kiss
As flashes steal the feel of dreams that he will never miss.
Oblivious to afterlife pursued from high and low,
He rests, instead, his heavy head to sleep beneath the snow.