Forager

A mistake made by man’s mingling fingers
Could not contain the broken match
As he fumbled, it fell, far forward into a forest
Where the beasts he’d slain had slept

At first, it was fun to watch
All the flickering flames go mad
A little taste of starting over
Quite a few memories coming back

It started with a leaf tossed carelessly
In hopes of forcing new habits
The tree tired of tenacious generosity
The leaching the ill had cast

And like a dying limb, it takes a little force
To remove such a terrible bourdon
But it will always remember of course
The colors that it left behind

Still, the flames continue to grow
And it consumes that wretched wood
The mistakes he made finally cut me off
From the decay of a broken loom

The forager scavenges in a barren wasteland
In hopes of recovering lost ground
The beating bastards burned such beautiful bourdon
And there is no life left to be found

Such optimism keeps him in the dirt
Looking for any sign of food
Just ashes the blasting left scattered apart
In this beyond gone desolate wood

Every foot step kills the growth
But he’s running out of time
The body aches from the mistakes he made
And it’s too late to save a life

The forager pleads for a fruit
That got buried in the mud
But the hands are dry, the earth is hard
And he falls in the pit of his cud

You reap what you sew, he knows, and it’s all too obvious now
The blanket he cast won’t save him past the match he threw at the ground
A thousand dead memories, he clings to their hollow corpses
The wailing waiting as the forager anticipates their voices
Swallows as the screams of the dead become too loud

The forager breaks that boundary
And leaches off a new stub
It rubs the plant on its teeth
The disgrace becomes too much

It’s pessimism that allows us to give up
We prepared for the worst
The forager lies in the sludge; it’s enough
To carry every single word

And walking in the forest carries nothing
The forager endures the soil
As after weeding out the new budding
The forager is no more