Tag Archives: mannequin

Inspired by “The Hollow Men” by T S Eliot.

I.

They are pedestal women
They are the mannequins
Posing together
Faces with no eyes. Alas!
Their mummied senses when
They gather together
Are dull and rotting
As bulbs in constant permafrost.
Their bodies with heads lost
For aesthetics.

Form without point, frame without picture,
Will-less hands, Shell without Ghost;

Those who inhabit
With disinhibition, life’s other kingdom
Remember them—if you care to—not as being,
Vapid husks, but instead
As pedestal women
Hanger women.

II.

Lives you dare not picture
In life’s dream kingdom;
They run amok:
There, the wits are
Knives without a whetstone
There, are shiny things
And thoughts are
Quieter than the wind weaker
Than an ant’s sigh.

Let us all draw away
From life’s dream kingdom
Let us not wear
The vain guises
No, no no no

Not live by others’ signals
In the gleaming kingdom.

III.

This is the false land
The vacuous land
Here the gold images
Are gathered, here they waste
Until the last moon is cast
And the future is past.

It is like this
In life’s other kingdom
Never alone
But a spiritless mass
Quivering with potential
That seeps away
Unused through seamless shrouds.

IV.

Their minds are not here
There are no minds here
In this maze of linoleum
They are hangers
In this post operation nose of a kingdom

In this meeting place
Young pods group together
And avoid speech
Of any weight more than a pebble

Agencyless, jointless
Prefrontal cortexless,
In life’s smudgeless kingdom
The realm
Of pedestal women.

V.

Sometimes fate
Is really just cross gartered socks

Between place
And thought
Is silence

Hold your peace

Between mouth
And chord
Is inactivity

Speechless

Between brain
And mind
Is care

Less and free
Care
Less and free

This is the way the world ends
They don’t even know how to regret
They have no words to regret
Only an animal’s whimper.