The Kingdom of Twilight

- Shashank Kumar

Twilight brings the sorrow

When man is set alight

Thoughts he does borrow

Full of his fears and fright

Of agony and anticipation

In the race called his life

Hopelessly lacking action

All but a hackneyed strife:

A conflict what to do and not

A compromise always to reach

Freedom as a child he sought

But life’s there with a breach:

A demise of all his dreams

A collapse of his owned desires

Morbidity shadows and seems

In those soft emotional pyres

Nothing, nothing but material

A world of stranded hollowness

Nothing, nothing heavenly real

In this dystopian heaviness

What’s existence in a coma?

What’s struggle on a deathbed?

What’s imaginative in a trauma?

What’s exaggerative in what’s said?

Smile, laugh, frolic in sarcasm

Scornful are the best of times

There’s no harmony or any charm

Nothing with which life so rhymes

And you’d go not thinking about

This is truth as night turns dark

Twilight will come again and sprout

Such questions you’ll hauntingly hark

And as if with spark, they’ll all fade

Like your emotions or things equally raw

You’d move on in a harrowing shade

Ignoring what you just heard and saw

And this way you’d just end one day

In a silent collapse of everything

My poem ain’t lovely or needs a say

But in your last breath, this song you’ll sing:

That twilight had brought the sorrow

When you, the man, was set alight

Thoughts you, the man, had then borrowed

Full of your manly fears and fright.