Surviving in Coastal Redwoods One Evening

Eyes opened when it was dark already, 

strangers at the campground had left 

and the stage was set like a macabre Poe story:

deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there. 

The giant redwoods stared in eerie silence, 

no longer lovely, dark, deep

were these forests. 

Phone was dead, no flashlight,

reeling from the leaves of grass, 

and consumed by the fear

of being mauled by mountain lions,

I danced like Hunter S. Thompson did in Vegas,

jumping at the faintest of sounds and imagining 

skin-crawling serpents.