The Empty Women

Candice James

Copyright 2009

I

With all we love stripped from us,

We are the empty women

Still holding 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;

But for we who reside beneath reality’s deep,

The world continues to spin without movement,

The aimless hordes of people move onward,

While we the empty women

Still hang onto the invisible past.

II

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 its 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.

III

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 defiantly in her insidious eye

Until her fury blinds us permanently.

We are the invisible women.

We are the primal scream.

With all we love stripped from us,

We are…..

The empty women.