What scares me through this dark forest?
It is not the dark,
Nor the wet socks,
Nor the treacherous rocks in the way
Nor the rustling of grass unpaved
Nor the occasional shriek of an owl
Nor the cold, nor the starvation
Nor the bats and insects and crawling creatures
Nor the unknown beyond horrid imagination
Nor the screams of sorrow's victims
Nor the silence, or the sheer loneliness
The only fear is existing
Painfully drifting
Having nowhere to go
No journey to bleed for,
Having to watch the forest burn
As hollers of delight emerge from monstrous look-alikes,
Siblings turned beasts of false pretenses and heavy machinery
And the more it burns, the more colorful it gets,
The more join in, the louder it grows, they're having a blast!
Till the smoke touches every molecule in the air,
Till we all suffocate in a carbon monoxide high
Forever frozen in a grin of painful ecstasy,
And the forest turns to ashes, awaiting a kinder generation,
A kinder species, perhaps.
october 17, 2022
3:21 p.m.