Hollow out the darkness.
There will be a tunnel of night.
It won’t have a name,
but you will learn to call it
love-soft words as your breath
turns to glass. At the end,
someone slips you a handful
of coins. You buy fish and bread
and ale. Tomorrow you wake
to a hollowed out sun.
On your stoop, the newspaper
burns. You read through flames
until your eyes ignite.
Better, sometimes, to be blind.
The tunnel yawns as it waits
in the glossy dark to swallow your life.
—
Steve Klepetar lives in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. His work has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, including four in 2016. Recent collections include Family Reunion (Big Table), A Landscape in Hell (Flutter Press), and How Fascism Comes to America (Locofo Chaps).
I love this! I’ve been working on a manuscript of poetry with the working title of “The Hollow” for quite a while, and none of it is as good as this poem. *shakes fist in Steve Klepetar’s direction*
I often shake my fist in Steve’s direction! 🙂
Heavy sense of apocalypse here, breath turning to glass, eyes igniting, the self and the universe hollowed out, eviscerated…better to be blind than witness this.in times Like these we suffer