The Waiting Room Poem by Norman F. Santos

As I lay, pensively, dying
Beneath the seething graze of the sun,
In a metaphorical metamorphism,
I found myself, in films, meandering
Like a white eccentric and fictional lion
Dashing through the endless pitch
Hollowness of an ornate forest
The insipid beast teemed with fear
And not of valiance, as in the label
In this pocket of a gyratory cul-de-sac
The ghosts, glacial and searing,
Runs along with my buoyant feet
Their wails struck the barricades
Of the looming myrtle trees
And an echolalia came to life
In its corporeal form, a wintry
Pang that gnawed upon my chest
And I ran faster, like a frenzied fiend
Till I saw an opalescent stranger
With a lamp on his rooted feet
And a knowing smile to trust
His ghastly fingers pierced
To an escape door beneath
A virulent garden of mushrooms
Without hesitations, I advanced
And he was left there unaccompanied
With a broken and ghastly smile
A wave of oppressive light surges
In the starkness of the brand new alleys
I can almost stare back at their eyes
But in this estrangement, I fumbled
Severing the savvy of recuperation
Nausea ubiquitously hanged
On a noose for two heads
A tinge of wonder rested on the other
Why did the spectral stranger
Never went for the escape door?
Perhaps he already knew
The drudgery in leisurely vying
To sprawl your qualms and quandaries
Inside a waiting room, half-alive.