My Missing Life
During the day, I faced the winds
and told everyone twenty years
had not mattered, my marriage had not
mattered, it was a chapter in a book
I was writing in the third person.
The plot would follow the life I chose
as long as I left the words in light.
All night, unable to sleep
I feared for my missing life.
I imagined it lost among the stars
and stolen by another universe
where I could never travel
to see how the story unfolded,
that I had loved my wife for more…
that I had been the father
my sons would want to be.
The fear was like a herd of buffalo
spooked by a fire in the dark,
stampeding across the sagebrush,
a thousand terrible energies.
The cliff unseen,
always somewhere ahead,
eventually the empty skulls.
Aden Thomas grew up on the high plains of central Wyoming. His work has appeared in The Inflectionist Review, Turtle Island, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. His first collection of poems, What Those Light Years Carry, was published in 2017. Read more at www.adenthomas.com.
Clementine Unbound 
![www.adenthomas.com](http://<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-43" src="https://clementineunbound.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/orange-line.png" alt="orange line" width="814" height="6" /> <h2>My Missing Life</h2> During the day, I faced the winds and told everyone twenty years had not mattered, my marriage had not mattered, it was a chapter in a book I was writing in the third person. The plot would follow the life I chose as long as I left the words in light. All night, unable to sleep I feared for my missing life. I imagined it lost among the stars and stolen by another universe where I could never travel to see how the story unfolded, that I had loved my wife for more… that I had been the father my sons would want to be. The fear was like a herd of buffalo spooked by a fire in the dark, stampeding across the sagebrush, a thousand terrible energies. The cliff unseen, always somewhere ahead, eventually the empty skulls. <hr /> <strong>Aden Thomas</strong> grew up on the high plains of central Wyoming. His work has appeared in The Inflectionist Review, Turtle Island, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. His first collection of poems, What Those Light Years Carry, was published in 2017. Read more at www.adenthomas.com. <hr /> ){kind=link}