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After Death and Taxes
 

What will you do when the sky falls on you,

When Earth and Chaos collide?

Will you run for the hills, or give in to its thrills,

Or just go along for the ride?

 

To live, to die, a thousand lives,

To see new worlds unfold

To question who you are inside

And wonder if you'll ever know.

 

Whispers, nightmares, call for help

And predators are waiting

To the sky, with gods to fly,

And promises worth making.

 

Horrors speak in light of day,

With the masses take a ride,

Faceless legions have their way,

For here you know you cannot hide.

 

When gods despair and rebels dare,

And the winds of change are blowing,

Will you follow the Mirrors glare

Without knowing where it's going?

 

Follow the call into the depths,

And answering their prayer

Something stirs within the deep

A hope amid despair.

 

Will you heed the unknown light,

In the darkest starless night?

With its power your fate decide

Or face the shadows at her side?
 

I always opt out of offering any real critique on poetry (I don't really have the vocabulary or understanding of it beyond the basic level of 'does it flow' or whatever) but just wanted to say I really enjoyed this and it was worth rereading a couple of times.

Nice concept of trying to put in an apocalyptic scenario in this manner. Some good use of metaphors in there. The last line of the fourth stanza sounded a wee bit off, something like ‘for you can’t hide’ sounds a bit more in sync with the rest of the quatrain. The idea of using double couplets and ballad quatrains simultaneously was pretty creative, though I’m not aware of any poems following this style.(Correct me if I’m wrong I’m not that aware) but it sounded in harmony so good job in being creative and following an unconventional yet effective style. 

I suppose it might change the context a bit if I mention that this is effectively the table of contents for a novel I have on Amazon. Each line corresponds to a chapter in the story. It tells the story but keeps things intentionally vague at the same time. The novel is called After Death and Taxes, naturally.

I was indeed going to say that it was too vague and generic for my liking, but given that it summarizes your book it might be nice to read for someone who's aware of the references.

I'm not that knowledgeable about poetry theory, I just go by ear so some of my observations will probably be wrong. Feel free to discard them.

The rhythm flows acceptably well as Shouja said, even though you mixed up different rhyme schemes. The poem goes: two ABAB stanzas (the first one also has two lines with internal rhymes), one ABCB, two ABAB, one ABCB and finally one AABB. Since stanzas are relatively separate units this doesn't affect the general musicality of the poem though.

The length of some lines sounded just slightly off (I'm talking about one-syllable differences) but this may very well be my subjective taste speaking. For example, "and predators are waiting" sounds like it should have an extra syllable to me because otherwise it creates a gap with the previous line lenght-wise. For the same reason, "For here you know you cannot hide" would maybe be better having a syllable less. The first and third line of the first stanza, despite being much longer than the lines they rhymed with, sounded alright thanks to having internal rhymes. This is just unnecessary (and probably wrong) nitpicking though, so feel free to ignore it.

Btw, was there a period or some punctuation after "waiting" in the third stanza? Because I can't make sense of that particular sentence otherwise. This is also probably a dumb question.

EDIT: just noticed that Shouja addressed the line length too. I would have gone with "For here you cannot hide" for that particular line.