First off, I'd like to point out the rather unsettling video above. It was pretty mach the inspiration for "Stick Men". Originally I had written it as a creepy poem about someone our age being stalked by a thin man (which is comparable to the popularized Slender Man), which has been a huge fear of mine since I was a kid. Just an abnormally slender person or group of slender people standing at the other end of a dark street from you. Anyway, that's the origin of the poem's horror element.

There were two common threads I saw in the comments I received back on "Stick Men", at least from what was discussed in class because the comments on the pages I received went into a lot more depth, and those were the fact that the last line was awful and there was too much attention paid to setting. Well, I'll elaborate on the setting bit first. A dark forest, as scary and mysterious as it can be to people, is a very big setting in most of my writing. For some reason, no matter how hard I try, if I put a dark forest in a piece I can't elaborate on it enough. For a poem, I can see how other imagery would be important, but the forest served as the main focus of "Stick Men" because it, in its own right, is the main antagonist and the Stick Men are merely agents.
As far as the last line goes, I got the resounding feeling that most people interpreted the narrator as a child. However, when I was writing "Stick Men", I pictured someone more my age or older who is still completely seized by his fear of the Stick Men. That's why I added that line; because I felt like he just wouldn't be able to help the poor child. Perhaps I was trying to hint at the speaker's past, but that might be a stretch.