Pratap's new poem

Echo’s Unheeded Warning


The loneliness.

Of walls built into strongholds.

Green fields. Once nourished with golden light,

Now barren, dead, quiet.

In the silent stillness, grey constructions,

Loom over murky skies;

Smooth stone facades reveal nothing.

Buildings multiply, the city grows – evolves

Clouds engulf, conceal,

the light of a perhaps wise past.

The golden lining really a shadow.

Where does the future lie?

The city expands.

Clanking factory wheels and crankshafts multiply.

By the second. Time saved is progress made.

The scheme.

Mass produced, cold steel boxes of intellectual misconceptions

Packed and mailed through my trusted synaptic network.

Birds lie belly-up under ailing apple trees,

As rotten as their fruits, clawing at the sky;

Pungent air, thick with viscous poison,

We suffocate, breaths rasping. Pleading.

The sun implodes into white light - the original emptiness.

The end is not near. The melting landscape whispers helplessly so.

We must yield; submit to the Shadow whose wrath

Spits incessant fires from hell. A juicy boar on roast.

Take it nice and slow. Don’t forget to let the skin

become golden crisp; and leave the meat tender inside.

Delicious.

The city explodes. Devours my green pastures.

Walls coming up by the second. There. There. There.

And there. All around, their steel sheen beyond my control.

A few steps too far in, or perhaps many. I cannot turn.

The only way is forward. Inside.

Sucked in like an acorn into the voracious depths of a black hole.

I can only hope what my colossal journey reveals will be beautiful.

If it doesn’t, I shall look out for the raven that waits patiently,

To pluck my eyeballs out of their hollow sockets. And I shall say,

Thank you.