Someone had painted the trails with blotches of shadows
And the evergreens went into hiding within them
Crippled leafs descend and ascend beautifully, reinforced by gust  

Elsewhere, in the Gulf of Mexico, the sun had been drowned
By the approaching night
And the sea waves flirt with the crescent shore

Here, the trail traces the forest vertebrae
Its coarse finger tips rips through maple tendons
And fossil stone cartilage
It cries and endures

It bleeds as we carve whispers in to its bark
Things that we are too afraid to say

Elsewhere, at the summit of Kilimanjaro,
Dawn swallows the foreboding night
And a young sun crawls out from underneath the white cap
The savanna shifts its eyelids open
And with a fray the old titans emerge

The tent stood under a basking tree
A young man lays inside quivering
From too many exposed bones
The flies rally and take turns exploring
His skin rots invisibly
And the stomach bugles from the weight of starvation
He would have swallowed the world if he could

But here, we trace the shadows of these trails
And carve our whispers in to dying woods
A sun is drowned every day.
And these crippled leafs shatter.

There is no Kilimanjaro here.
No Gulf small enough to save the sun