A walk with ghosts

I walk with ghosts

in this town of discarded yesterdays

where, in days past,

the past was abandoned

and the revisit

is dangerously close

on my watch.

I walk with ghosts;

I carry the spectre,

the sepia images,

the romance of former lives,

the forest of felled aspirations

from the dream-days of youth.

I walk with ghosts

along realigned paths;

haunted by the present

and a phantom future

served by automatons.

I walk with ghosts

and wonder

if I have been cut

too close to the root.