If you wish to seek it, just follow the music.
It's the sound of a tin can against asphalt.
The melody is the echo of the lost.
Humanity sucked into an apple, a smartphone- a PlayStation.
The babysitter and her boyfriend
have AI on the brain.
If you find it, there is no rescuing it.
It's become necrosed and hollow-eyed.
Burnt beyond recognition.
Humanity in a tin can ward
with third-degree burns
over 100 percent of its soul.
The new world is in raggedy disorder
Jesus can't come soon enough.
"In memory of Eliza and Emily"
Twelve Years a Slave, Eliza Berry's life marked by cruelty, a tragedy of slavery.
She rose to lower heights as she plucked the cotton with
her bare hands
Stooped over she pulled the cotton from the bolls, fine cotton
that it was !
Twelve years of slave-hood, her daughter taken for her beauty
was separated from her youth...
Haggard, hollow-eyed and filled with sorrow she worked soberly
for she would not be sold, she was not for sale !
Eliza wept tears of grief but, there was nothing she could do,
her daughter had been taken away from her.
Come back—don’t leave me—come back, mama, was her last cry
until distance intervened and then all was finally wholly lost.
Foot Note: Eliza never saw or heard of Emily. In the cotton field, always and everywhere she was talking to her. Only when absorbed in that illusion or asleep, did she ever have a moment’s comfort, afterwards.
I wake up heavy, hollow-eyed,
a war inside I cannot hide.
My chest is full of aching glass,
each breath I take, a splintered gasp.
I try to speak, but words betray—
they twist my truth, then slip away.
They say, “Just love yourself, be kind.”
But how do you hug what you can’t find?
I look for worth in others’ eyes,
but all I see are blurred goodbyes.
I give too much, I break, I bend,
and wonder why I’m not the end
they choose to stay for, hold, defend—
I’m always just the in-between.
I wear a mask too thick to peel,
a smile that lies, “I’m fine, I heal.”
But I’m unraveling at the seams,
a stitched-up soul with silent screams.
I scream in silence every night,
a voice that knows it has no right.
To need, to want, to just exist
without conditions, without lists.
How do you love a heart so torn?
How do you hold what self has scorned?
I search for proof I’m more than pain,
but all I find is rust and rain.
Still… I wake. I rise. I try.
I walk beneath a darkened sky
and hope, just maybe, if I stay—
I’ll learn to love a piece someday.
The winter stared at me, hollow-eyed and grim,
flakes of snow draped the earth in silence.
My lips quivered, teeth rattling their cold refrain,
and they danced—not with legs, but with their whole bodies.
Then my head went numb, my thoughts unwound,
consciousness slipped beyond the veil.
I soared like the angels—we all grew wings,
new arrivals, lost among strangers.
Before a great gate, we were set apart,
memory severed, the past a whisper.
The snow had risen~an unbroken white peak,
and the trees stood crowned in frost’s embrace.
My eyes grew misty, each tear frozen mid-fall,
my mind still locked in winter’s grasp.
Like thieves vaulting from shattered glass,
memories took flight, then scattered like dew on rooftops.
I searched for myself in pools of melted snow,
but my past had fled like a startled horse.
No trace remained~no pain, no triumphs,
only the wait to whine or wine and dine.
Yet even if a cup were placed in my hands,
the taste of good wine lay lost upon the wind.
As time shortens
The aisles fill
Hollow-eyed scavengers
Prowling ransacked shelves
The challenge
Of the “tic-toc” clock
Santa will get the credit
They will get the debit
As they sit deluded
Batteries not included
Hamlet, sharpen your sword of trust, for Macbeth is surely waiting.
The specter of ‘Civil war’ stalks the land and the ghosts of senseless violence, so long docile, have come to hollow-eyed attention.
Our cauldron was filled with innocence, as the ever-thirsty succubi require, the glory of war is being shaken, not stirred and the betrayal will be served as quick and cold as steel.
#chefskiss
They tell me to put one foot in front of the other
But why should I do that when I don’t know where I’m going?
Maybe they want me to wander forever
Alone, starving, a hollow-eyed husk of a girl
I tremble as brisk wind gusts my brittle frame
They take my heart apart carefully with surgical gloves and scalpels
Prodding poking pulling shredding
They collect my blood in vials and store them in neat rows on dusty shelves
I have always been too loud, too big, too much
I have always wanted to be nothing.
I whittle away at my body, carving off pieces of my sense of self
I was made from a broken mold but I’m trying so hard to smooth over the cracks
I press crescents into my palms with ragged nails
My knuckles are bruised the same violet as the circles under my eyes
I dig under my skin and rip it up in sheets, hanging them from a laundry line
This journey feels more like a nightmare
The West is slipping away.
On the East side of this living space
light slips its shadowy leash,
paints a last frameless image
upon a bare wall.
Moving closer
I study a shape as it shifts slightly
while an unseen sun
shoulders the earth again.
If I squint it might be the face
of a friend. I look for fever,
the hollow-eyed recognition of death -
no it’s not her death mask
this is before the last breath arrived
a momentary representation
before her fade out.
I had assumed it was light
playing upon a surface
but see that the East has leached out again,
and it can cross the world
and travel time
arriving always before
the impatient night.
I don’t know if we were the first,
other's had sailed away.
There were rumors of settlements.
Years later, pleading petitions to the king,
then silence.
Months of turmoil and torment
upon the merciless seas.
Our ship almost a wreck,
the pox and plague
having whittled us down,
to a motley band of hollow eyed scavengers.
Then Land sited!
The fabled Americas! Those yonder shores
must be that fearful, paradise of legend.
We had overcome!
The Captain led his weary folk ashore,
but being the ships cat I stayed
to find the last remaining rat.
That night I dreamed
that the ship up-anchored all by itself.
The men dashed back to the shore
to save the vessel, but I, the last sailor,
rigged the tattered sails
and flew before the wind back to England,
but not before I had fired my pistols
into the yelling, stranded, and doomed crew.
‘Not yet America,’ I thought – ‘not yet.’
Coal hearted caretaker
never could accept or give love
has a collection of wounded women
placed them in his half-dead heart museum.
He painted over one with his oil-colored tongue.
Stuffed her into a silent taxidermy bird.
He turned some into paper mâché mobiles.
Fingered them into a sad sort of yellowing.
They, void of any hope, were left for dead.
Forever spinning in the end of his selfish head.
Others sit hollow-eyed, clay pot women.
Left on a dusty shelf, chipped and rotting.
Mostly from disrespect and neglect.
Another is in the foyer for the unsmiling,
Colossal bronze busts, monuments to this volcanic prick of destruction.
The final conquest was glass blown.
He melted her spirit into a glowing poem.
A masterpiece born from a seed of sadism.
Hung it in a forgotten corner of his mind.
Framed it in his blood and karmic dust...
Someday he'll have to pay back these endless debts.
And become a forgotten etching in a derelict museum.
Our eyes shy away
from the watchers amid the nets.
In an empty apartment,
the gossamer gloom of old lace,
back-lit by a spectral light.
Faces long gone
from empty rooms,
scan hollow-eyed
each passer-by.
Every dim dawn and dusk,
a forgotten face
peers through them.
The stars are silent.
The net curtains
watch and will not tell,
but now in the gleaming,
all eyes lower,
as dusk settles upon
netted fenestella.
How do you know this?
You remember
passing by,
and walking in – don’t you?
Some Tsunami…….
Today is calm.
The end of the ocean licks the land,
salt fingers idle townward,
chortling shingle laughs into
new born pools shattering
a thousand iridescent suns
into faceted frenzy.
Seaweed ambassadors inspect
The beach on spume horses
But today is calm
Yesterday, some tsunami or
Savage Gods incandescent rage
turned you tiger and
towered you townward maiming
terrified beach huts
murdering screaming deckchairs
hurling delinquent shingle at
dark hollow eyed cafes
But today….today is calm
I beseech the shards of my shattered self,
as recollections collect with a jagged edge,
for a softened reflection of a dream in smithereens
to sheath this sunken cheeked shadow
lost in the mirrored fragments
of hollow-eyed tears.
Susan Ashley
February 12, 2019
~ Sixth Place ~
Premiere Contest: May 2019 Premier 4 (Max 14 Lines)
Sponsor: Brian Strand
~ Fifth Place ~
Contest: Capture That Emotion
Sponsor: Nina Parmenter
Hollow eyed
gatherers of material... things
thick egos smashing everything
no understanding of our insignificance
against the black curtain of time and stars
forgetting the lessons from our scars
Christ crushing little rogues
'til we snap our heart bones
'til the awakening slaps us back
into a puddle of our ashes
Another candle-lit eve
brimming with flowers and stuffed things
tin tears and puffy prayers
fiery speeches from cherry-tongued preachers
all the while the hollow-eyed ogre smirks.
Waves of:
blame
the gun
ratatatat
blame
the man
ratatatat
blame
society
ratatatat
blame
our faulty, faded genes...
ratatatat
Nothing ever gets done,
they're Numb to the origins of carnage and blood.
Thinking it will never happen to us.
But there's a pair of snake eyes
in the back of every school bus.
Do not deny there were always clear signs.
There are always signs
Please pay attention to the signs!
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