Best For:
Readers who seek the opposite of sanitized outdoor culture, hikers who trek the land for recognition over recreation, and Poetry lovers who understand repetition as breath rather than structure.
The Vault:
- Repetition as refusal, not decoration
- “Fuck a trek” a grounding anchor line through the poem
- Nature as identity recognition rather than scenery
- Storm, river, forest, & animal imagery used as lived systems, rather than symbolism
- Crows functioning as memory carriers across time
- Mythic framing without leaving physical reality
- Civilization positioned as background noise, not central focus
Reclaimed the Trailhead of Creativity:
Here I choses to use a phrase poetically after I flipped it on it’s head. Thankfully the piece continued to refuse to settle back into anything polite.
Fuck a trek.
The line that became the title and the spine. I can’t lie. I love the drama in it, creating chaos in literature has been a favorite of mine for quite sometime.
You will find local foliage and woodland items many times in nature like you find the line Fuck a trek. Just like nature you’ll never experience the line the same.
This is an accumulated reflection of all my time spent on the trail.
Weather it’s ravines after ridges, cliffs above the gorge, caves or anything in between… it’s all relevant to the climb you’re in. Eventually this will stop feeling like something you force yourself to get finished and starts feeling like refreshing your soul.
Fuck a Trek-
An Original Poem by Axton Mitchell:
Fuck a trek.
I require
found bones,
stream-smoothed stones,
and a sky
heavier with weather
than any grief I’ve carried.
Fuck a trek. Root-bound.
River-raised. Fully feral.
Trail Troll.
Fuck a trek.
I was raised between thunderstorms.
Led by lightning flashes.
Taught most I know
beneath thunder’s loudest boom.
Fuck a trek.
Let me wander
until I find
trees yet to
learn my name.
Fuck a trek.
Leave me
where the mushrooms grow.
Where the path forgets itself.
Overgrown. Wild. Dirt-encrusted. Wind-tousled. Sun-speckled.
Freckled.
Fuck a trek.
Crows lead.
Lost boy follows.
Finding pieces he
dropped years ago.
Crows remember
the shiny things he gifted.
Moss-covered mason jars.
Creek-water soaked spell books.
A cathedral needing no walls.
Fuck a trek.
Let the city keep its lights.
I have fireflies.
Sunlight through a canopy. Campfire embers. Dusk.
Old forests. Unfinished tales.
Fog blankets
draped over hollows.
River hymns muffled by distance.
The muddy banks still call my name.
Civilization waits. Patient.
As I always ensure.
Poet’s Note:
I didn’t write this from any one space. It came to me out of the years I’ve been moving through forests, rivers, ridgelines, and overgrown paths.
This week I did a few hikes in Illinois and Indiana; drafting this piece while my windshield wipers were just getting used to being back in Ohio.
Mason jars, spell books, and the other objects that show up in this poem aren’t decorations or abstract images. They’re tied to real moments I’ve had in wilderness spaces, things that were actually there with me, things I’ve used or carried or come back to in memory because they belong to that terrain as much as anything else does.
Crows, storms, stone, fire, light, the edges where town breaks into wild space, all of that exists together the way it actually does when I’m there
Present.
The way the poem moves isn’t linear because that’s not how the wilderness feels in my reflection. Like the title repeats I have passed through similar ground again. It does shift. Allowing me to notice different things each time even when the shape of the place looks familiar.
“Fuck a trek” is the pressure point in it. It interrupts the idea that this is supposed to be packaged into something neat or resolved or explained away. It keeps pulling it back into contact with what’s actually there instead of what it could be made to represent.
The beauty in art and literature is that everyone is allowed to have a perspective on them of their own. All these perspectives still remains true to their interpretation.
This is my perspective. I want to remind you that yours valid too.
If you’d like to share your perspective, I’m always excited what others see growing inside my creations.
Take a Hike:
This piece stays inside the same world it was built from. Forest edges, river ground, ridgelines, places where attention doesn’t sit still and nothing stays reduced to a single meaning.
What it leaves behind isn’t a lesson or a takeaway. It’s the same material it started with, just arranged into language instead of lived movement.
The rest is still out there.
TLDR:
Repetition-based poem built around “Fuck a trek” as an anchor line. Centers on forest, river, and storm imagery drawn from lived time outdoors.
Rejects structured outdoor culture in favor of direct, unmediated experience.Uses memory, nature, and mythic elements as a single continuous system.
Built as spoken rhythm, not linear narrative or resolution.
Related Reading:
Leave No Trace. US Forest Service.
Leave a Reply