I dreamed of the last day
and saw cloth-bound remembrances
floating on the rising tide,
sent adrift by the shadows
standing on the shore:
eidolons sending their wishes
upon the currents to the myth
of a promised land,
their prayers forgotten
by the quiet, empty sky.
There’s the sound of shattering glass,
and a sudden intake of breath.
Someone has stirred from sleep:
A hollow man,
too weak to dream,
standing beneath a hollow sun,
too weak to grant
the comfort of warmth.
I beheld now the fraying
of a thousand things,
the hollow man
in a slow march,
walking along the razor’s edge,
pacing through the disorder of our time,
remembering a world
the gods abandoned,
remembering that he is
the last of his kind,
born in solitude,
enduring loneliness
at the end of all things.
He looks up
and sees the truth,
and then begins to weep:
a corpse is hanging in the sky,
the hollow husk of hope embodied,
exsanguinated,
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slowly spinning about,
crucified by the silken threads
of venomous beasts,
who tread lightly in the evening air.
They are all that remains in this place,
scavengers feeding
on the dead and the damned,
and they shall gorge themselves
for centuries yet,
as shadows moving
unseen in the quiet,
in the cold and the dark.
The hollow man
beheld the silent ones,
and looked into the earth,
packed with the dead
and the gone,
knowing that he would join them soon,
and he stands
deaf and dumb,
weeping in a world covered
in ash and mist
He turned to the things
floating on the sea,
watching them swell,
bloated with grief,
with the regret of
the World-That-Was,
that can never be again.
Then, at last,
weighed down by
tears of loss,
they sank into the silence,
swallowed whole
by the darkness.
Death comes,
and a night that will not end.
As the sky is stained red
with the final sunset,
the hollow man sat
in the dying world
and waited.
