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.