THE EMPTY WOMEN
Candice James
Copyright 2009
With all we love stripped from us,
We are the empty women
Still hanging onto the invisible past,
As we glare through tears heavy
With icicles into the jagged future
Of our past mistakes repeated.
Inside a gnawing nightmare,
Reminiscent of a hungry rat
Trying to digest the petrified bones of yesterday’s silent kill,
There is an all pervasive cacophonic symphony
Blasting profanity into our fragile sanity.
This is the moment that has somehow
Turned into an eternity of prisms spitting out prevaricated prisons
Laced with lost hope and broken dreams,
While we the empty women
Still hang onto the invisible past.
Grasping voraciously at the vestiges
Of raw meat that still cling to the
Bittersweet bones of this skeleton
That has no key, has no door, we
Peer through the windows of time
Past, present and future with the
Full knowledge that time does not pass.
Trapped in this perpetual loop of yesterday,
Spending all our todays and tomorrows,
We calculate everything back to zero,
Back to the beginning which is the end
Of all the footsteps paced to reach it.
We come to the river not to cleanse our sin
Or wash away the memories that haunt us.
We come to the river to drown in the emptiness
We have become within the loop of now.
Submerged in the icy cold, peering up
Through a shaft of sunlight that slices
The surface above us, life seems kinder,
Brighter and possibly even beautiful
For those who walk on the water;
Not for we who now reside beneath reality’s deep.
The world continues to spin without movement
And the aimless hordes of people move onward,
While we the empty women
Still hang onto the invisible past.
A hard icy finger infused with ink
Scrawls across the water color canvas
Of this dream’s sorrowful soured breath,
Inscribing in blood red letters
The last rites to love’s brutal exit.
Beneath the muted pounding of our heartbeats
Rain is streaking old sundowns anew,
Birthing new colors too vivid to behold,
Too painfully sharp, defying description.
We have seen brutality, pain, tears and death.
We have tasted life, love, empathy, pity,
But pity us not for well we knew the path
We chose so carelessly to embark upon
Clad only in worn out, torn slippers.
Each wounded step exacerbates the soul.
We listen for the moans of a spirit
Ever so distant we can’t quite hear it.
A gentle whisper becomes a thunderous roar
Crashing the shoreline of it’s long lost wish.
Still we search the desolate dunes for a beacon
Of light to dust the sand off Aladdin’s lamp.
A rainbow has rusted itself to the sky’s eye
Disallowing the coveted sleep it seeks,
Disavowing the coveted peace we seek.
And we the empty women
Still hang onto the invisible past.
This beach is strewn with broken shells
And decorated with fractured pebbles
Like a spirit dissected into a jigsaw puzzle
Of pieces too worn and warped to fit
Anything resembling penance or reward.
All things given are rendered undeserved
In the schematics of this damaged humanity.
Stars fall from the black velour mantle above
Burning to cinders in the dark ashtray of night
As if they never were, as we never are.
We are only interference patterns continuously
Imprinting ourselves surreptitiously onto like patterns
And then moving onward against our will, but still
Within the scope of our predestined decisions.
We are the wounded elegy of a starless universe
Clinging to the black hole we’ve become,
Searching for exits long ago extinct,
Inside this spiraling senseless destruction.
We are the cause of nothing at all
That always is as it ceases to be,
Becoming everything that cannot matter
In an antimatter of parallel atrocities.
We create innocuous realities and
Seed them with a criss cross pattern
Of anonymous need that screams
An abhorrent rage for personification.
Primal urges are sacrosanct and hidden
In a cavern closed like a paralyzed eyelid,
Surveying only imagined sequences, feint
Flickers on a façade of inherited iniquity,
While we the empty women
Still hang onto the invisible past.
Empty women cry out in desperation
Hungering in the dark for a quicksilver touch
Or a broken caress that emulates life
In it’s most secret burial or cremation.
We are a bruised breeze lost beneath
The glazed murky waters of life’s tidal tomb,
Aching deep within for a whirlpool or current
To carry us far, far away from this
Broken down desolate town of tears we reside in.
Empty women, past the point of no return
Twisting inside a tattered cocoon of despair.
These butterflies will never be born, never fly.
This is the death that never was but always is.
This is the moment we live in now
And now is forever as forever is always now
Within our own happenstance happenings
Of divine superfluous fate.
We stare infinity in her insidious eye
Until her fury blinds us permanently
As we the empty women
Still hang onto the invisible past.
We are the invisible women.
We are the forgotten dream.
We are the primal scream.
With all we love stripped from us
We are the empty women
Still hanging onto the invisible past.