The Great Wide Empty

Your home is planted six feet down

in a casket of monarch blue.

A light sky crepe supports your crown

to give comfort and peace to you.

Flowers impart their folded breath.

A flood of reckon fills the eyes;

and through your death, I see my death.

This fatal skin its senses rise.

 

Empty frames embody a void,

echoes lost in a wordless cry.

A pantheon for Sigmund Freud,

bright stars are falling from the sky.

The universe is cracked in half.

The dimming darkness looms above.

A carved headstone and epitaph

are tributes to the one thereof.

 

Pictures not taken - going, gone.

Moments lived are once and only.

It falls apart, so on and on,

unremembered, lost and lonely.

Aching to fill the holes with light,

we lick lightning’s radiant rod

in Faustian realms of dark night

bursting wide on the lips of God.

 

The great wide empty heart of man

sheds shadows in darkened places

proffering what little it can

like children with dirty faces.

A hand out is a hand in need.

A lock is latched upon the door.

Bleeding out, we forget to bleed.

Instincts harden forevermore.

 

You lay within earth’s deep, dark keep

sculpting time with fingers of bone.

These are the truths we all shall reap

in a wasteland of stele stone.

The later years are maudlin years,

whittled thin as a winding sheet.

Redemptive tears are final tears

with martyred dreams beneath our feet.

 

I know the night is overdue.

There is a point of no return.

The flow of life from me to you

no bloody ghost can overturn.

The heart shall pen its final beat

in brittle veins of paper skin

in ode to life lived incomplete -

the great wide empty born within.

Author's Note

Reviews

[John the Baptist]

This is a meditation on mortality, no question about that, but I feel it was inspired by a particular individual. The person is never named, but it is whoever is being addressed in the first verse. There are other points in the poem where the same individual is being spoken to. Evidently, he or she represents death to the speaker. and perhaps their passing created an inner void for the speaker. This is not a happy poem, but it does focus on a truth: We are all going to cross that line some day.

[Linda Marie Van Tassell]

You are always so perceptive. This poem has been in the back of my mind for a while. The first stanza is about my mother, who died in 2009. I have always been bothered by the fact that I have no pictures from my childhood, and empty frames on a wall was the inspiration for this write.

[Crowley]

brittle veins of paper skin...wow, that's incredible. The whole thing falls from first line to last line like an unwanted impending rainstorm. Desperate and fantastically dark. great piece of writing!

[Linda Marie Van Tassell]

Thank you, Crowley.

[willweb]

"The big wide empty heart of man" There is a darkness to this poem and a dampness it seems as feelings seep through the earth searching for the light of truth. At least that is what I took from this. Often emptiness finds us when we long for a different outcome. Beautiful poetry my friend

[Linda Marie Van Tassell]

Thank you, Will. A different outcome, yes; and the sadness that it's not.