I Built a Citadel to Burn
The superfluity of adamant nights and babel of storms
Tarried and wrecked the quietude of my sleepy home
Desperately I groped for a banister, for a reeling rope
A lynch for long abeyance or a pallid streak of hope
But this town is already a wraith of its own ghosts
And perish is near, unabashed to morph a colossus form
Brick atop a brick, a tourniquet of bastion I built
Endeavoring to feign the contours of a thousand mirth
And vie I did, to an assuaging forget but not to flee
From the peremptory entice of effulgent revelries
And a shadow I casted, never shall falter nor tilt
And becoming the verve of the citadel I built
The soulless lullaby of bulwark walls err shan't
Dark shall fade, storms shall beat and die to pant
A safeguard from the descrying coruscations of light
Sequestering with its shadows, unfurling many a terror
Of veritable sorrows that yonder facilely linger
And these walls, like sleep and lullaby, only lulls my horror
The corridors protract in a labyrinthine vast
Succumbing all echoing calls in the patina to rust
The lofty ceiling looms and jarringly taunts
To beguile you of depth, and of ravine haunts
Even the chandeliers tinker mendaciloquence
To superimpose the bliss I heed for defense
Outside the portcullis, nil can penetrate
Inside the halls, beckons of lone are desperate
Nary a chance the adversary could shuffle
To bring this cordon down to its graceful topple
Such aggrandized fortress perhaps can save
The king I made from a doggedly slave
As the king that I was exultantly revels inside
Comported by the hearth and his sovereign's stride
The coals of fire beckons in charred cinders
A crown of thorns once worn that never quavers
And of the present yet remote storm and dark forlorn
Inside his simpers and under his throne
The suppressing citadel throttled inside
His black and dying heart long put aside
Insensitive to the fray of the city and of his own
The phantoms roused from their stiff reckon
How sad was he in his contrived perpetuity
Filling the void by burying all that he was in a city
Secluded and protected it was, idyllic not quite
The sedations will ebb to fade out in the blight
And lone inside his walls of salient divide
A grave, a cage, succumbed by his own tide
And so tonight, despite late and futile
The king built a citadel to burn and born his plight
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
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