Who knows where it ends..!!

Out from the benign shelter of my solitude,
I walk into the humdrum crowd of market place.
Surely curious of the deals of varying multitude,
I move at a slower pace.

Things were bought and sold, be it new or old,
Goodwills bought and loyalties traded within many a fold.
Hostilities doled out and friendships paraded,
My eyes of stone, not that I really cared.

I kept moving through the crowd, through the people that met me,
through the people I met.
I looked right through,
the luring trinkets on the roadside stalls,
the glassy eyed gazes,
the shiny convertible that rolls past me,
the beggar dragging on its haunches.

I failed to hear the market bustle,
the chirpy birds or even a silent rustle.
A muted panorama envelops my presence,
mouths open for a scream,
blaring horns throttled,
dumbed down engines,
every word, every whisper,
cry or a moan as if congealed in thick air.

I walk right through the hurtling traffic,
through an ocean of people marching a step closer to happiness,
through jungles of glass and concrete,
through the high order that civilizes and imprisons us.

As the day mellows down with darkness in sight,
the world returns to roost with its comforting familiarity of sight,
sound,smell and touch all right.

I still move along, aloof, alone and shy,
looking for my reason, happiness and joy.
Now I walk into the darkness,the market resting,
but the roads are still filled up with uncanny shapes moving and jostling.
I can clearly see the fluid shapes floating in the darkness,
I almost collide into one but swerve past to save myself.
The darkness stares back at me with its evil-looking eyes.

The faint whisper of arguments and conflicts begin to get heard and then grow louder.
Cries of agony, pleadings for help surface over the night,
the noises become too loud to flee or fight.

The darkness stares at me with its now ember eyes.
I run astray into the unknown, colliding with,
shapes with no faces and figures with no existence.
Obnoxious smell trails me and somewhere near I can sense the putrid smell of something rotten,
Hunted down by my own senses, I panic and darkness looks like something ill begotten.