One of my most recent poems was seven pages long

It isn’t hard for me to think of things to say, 

Just hard for me to say them

There are footprints left by people and birds

And rabbits and deer and

They are fresh, in the mud

Just like they were in the snow

Not even a full month ago

I find that I am not prepared to meet the Future

There are elegant trees, colorful

Skinny trees, and reaching oaks;

Leafy plants leaning outward towards the sun

Have you heard that quote, the one that goes something like the,

“Worst things in our life come free”

I have to ask, for you, is that me?

The trees’ branches twist and wind like the paths I follow

In these woods & in my life

Brown and verdant, leading further and further,

Beckoning me, into the unknown

They are speckled and split but I have a strange sort of faith

Not a god I believe in, more like the universe

And the secrets kept by and within it

Hands on a tree trunk, looking up at the tallness of it all

Just grazing the gray clouds up above

That look like pillows gently dropped onto

A pale sheet of blue

You’re like a siren calling me,

Pulling me back in

Leave me alone

Get outta my head

The bark is rough and kept together like scales,

Or a puzzle

Kept together like the pieces of my heart,

The racing thoughts inside my mind,

It is kept together like humanity;

Where there is one broken scale, a single broken tile,

There is always another broken one, another two chipping away,

Another three ready to fall; to hit the the wet, bouncy ground

The ground where so many have walked upon, the ground where so many are still yet to come

Eyes ahead, don’t wanna lose focus 

Like I did the last three hundred times

I keep spilling my guts to him but 

The devil doesn’t mind

I keep thinking about the past

Am I opening up too much?

She said she’d be back but she never was

I tell them I’ll be back but I don’t return and people

Get upset

And I don't blame them

I can be a terrible friend

There used to be more trees here, it is so obvious

And so sad, what with the distant sound of constant cars on a highway, less than twenty five feet away

The smell of the fallen leaves and dripping sap is still strong here and

I wish to hold onto it for as long as one really can hold on to anything in this changing world, 

This gone in the blink of an eye life,

This strangely beautiful universe

I savor it because I am fearful of the Future

The eeriness that may come to be, the melancholy silence I’ve already come to know

The world, the woods, no longer really, “the woods” because it may be

Devoid of trees, knobby roots in the ground replaced by human bones

Mossy rocks exchanged for fairly new headstones

Carbon and smog filling the atmosphere; filling everyone’s lungs

Everyone as in the people still left, the people somehow holding on

Fallen branches will be fallen cables, and time will seem forgotten

Like everything good that once was