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The Lion of the Dusk

The flourished crimson heaven
That had been mantling the meagerness
Of the famished world
Slowly escaped in seething hisses.
Every layer of faint illumination
That dissipates is refilled
By a jet black cloak.
The cicadas and the crickets
Seemed to enjoy the sublimation
And started on a
Strident carousal,
The soaring birds sang
Their swansong as
They heaved the thinning air
To ferry their plumage home,
The dog-tired grass
Halted from beating the blows
Of the southern winds,
The wind dragged deeper
From the clandestine place
Where it was accumulating
And the afternoon zephyr
Started to whistle
To call for the pouncing gales,
The trees stooped
And their eaves scooped lower.
The premature night extended
Its pliant hand holding
A lighted match and sets fire
To the slumbering
Sundered quasars.
And then it hanged a slice
Of a bloated disk
Burnished with pallid opalescence.

There was something subtle
In the dance of the dawning eve
Along the halls of ambiguity
That is not too subtle,
For you can feel it in insentience.
It was subliminal and with ornate
Delicacy that could only unfurl
Its armadillo potency
To a soul with a lion's heart.

In the pensive metamorphosis
Of the firmament,
An olive pond resting
On the core of the frowning
Life ebbs with the cloying
Darkness.
Its resilient diminutive surges
Swelled and rouse into
A silver river.
It roused shrilling,
Hastily filling
The drought in the hungry mouth
Of a vale.
It circumnavigated
And shrouded
The whole forest
And the lion could not escape
The lure of the briskly mirrors.
The clarity of its veneer
Resembles the piercing
Enamel of death's scythe
And the lion mused upon
The face of reality
In its hostile fangs.
Wrought defeats,
Scarred abandons,
Marred advances
Were groveling in the dark lids
Of two tired and deluded eyes.
The lion stood like a frozen rock,
His feet were a frozen brook.
Before the frozen pillars thaw,
The lion ran with scorching alacrity
Escaping the alluring slices
Of the starlights in the vivid reflection;
Running back to slumber on his den.

His den; a cavern of profound
And grotesque assemble
Of copper yarns, metal strings,
And serrated attachments
That pulls each other
In a taut embrace
Then toppled
As a cloying phantasm.
And there were hurtling daggers
Nicking in his tawny skin.
One got him in the chest,
And he lowered his head.
His golden mane tangled up
In the stubbles of his face.
An owl hooted
From the distance
And the echoes of it
Hammered the punctured chest.

The forest stooped lower that night
In a desire to haul and cradle
The tatterdemalion lion,
But the forest's arms
Could never reach a wandering soul.
The lion ceaselessly vied
In profanity.
He hunts surreptitiously
For chances
Of vindicating his golden diadem.
In such instances,
He would divulge the colossus heart
Made of diamonds.
In those instances,
The scars and disease
Would overwhelm and engulf
The diamond heart to shatter
In jagged pieces.

The forest has ears,
But the roars and prowls of the lion
Exploded in an atomic static
That no ears
Can ever realize.
The forest has eyes,
And he can see
The lion sprinting into
The expanding breadth
Of the pitch black
Holding a fire fueled
By a lithe ardor between
His latticing fangs,
In the semblance of
The waking dusk itself.
The forest had no tongue
But it had called the lion
Several times,
And the leaves pranced
For the wind to carry its message,
Brushing the laments of the lion.
The forest called him "The Lion of the Dusk".
And the forest could only brood
In the brittleness
Of each sunrise,
That he could never speak of
What the lion was
And no one would ever find
The lion in his lanky,
Unattractive and farcical veneer.

poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
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