Miss You In Mid Autumn

The street I walk wears memory like bark—
each tree a sentinel of years we missed.
They used to blush in gold, then brown, then dark,
from crown to root, a slow and patient tryst.

But now, one-third of every treetop’s bare,
as if the sky reached down and plucked them clean.
The rest hang on—amber, rust, despair—
like promises too fragile to redeem.

Even the trees try hard to speak your name:
their skeletal fingers trace your silhouette
against a sky that knows no two autumns’ same
when one half’s warmth is gone, and cold’s the debt.

I’ve walked this road through golden, lonely falls,
watched leaves cascade like tears the earth recalls.
Each crunch beneath my boots, a whispered call—
your ghost in every shadow, every stall.

I long for touch that isn’t wind’s cold kiss,
for hands that warm more than just autumn air.
For laughter tangled up in branches’ hiss,
for you—not memory—standing waiting there.

These trees, they know. They strip themselves to bone,
to mirror how I feel when you’re not near.
Their emptiness, my own—both overgrown
with silence only longing makes so clear.

So let them stand, half-bald against the gray,
a forest of my heart, stripped bare by time.
They’ll bud again, come spring’s forgiving ray—
but I? I ache for you in every rhyme.

—

*The trees don’t lie. They change because they must.
I change because I miss you—deep as rust.*