DAS LITERARISCH
ISSN No: 2454 – 4647 (Print Issue) || Vol: 3, Issue 1 || Jan-June 2020
https://shaheenfoundation.co.in/ 99

Ashok Kumar Dash
(Jamshedpur, India)

Nocturnal Ordeal

Don’t wish me
in ecstatic words
“Good night, sweet dreams.”
My nights are no longer good
and dreams no longer sweet.
Dreams are but nightmares
that shatter my sleep
and nights are but
concentration camps for torture.
Sleep comes to me
but in fits and starts
and are soon after disturbed
by bizarre dreams-
I neither can recollect nor decipher.
Tick tock, tick tock
goes the wall clock
gifted by my father’s colleagues
on my wedding
some forty years ago-
a legacy of the past.
Eyes shut and
ears glued to the clock
I try to slip into
the monotony of
my uneventful past
in a futile bid to sleep.
A train of snapshots-
some sweet, some sour,
some horrific, some balmy-
flies past my mind’s eyes
in a quick succession
transporting me to a state of
constant unrest.
Faces of a child,

an adult, and an old man
grotesquely overlapped;
promises not kept,
self not actualized,
love unrequited,
responsibilities half-met,
and Time’s winged chariot
hurrying near-
violently shake me up
in an eerie wakefulness.
Though blinded by the dark
I can distinctly perceive
wolves howling,
lions roaring,
hyenas screaming
and rushing towards me
raising their venomous claws
to tear me apart…