He marches with the living in their daily processional,
keeping to the rhythm and the pace, confessional
only in the privacy of no one asking and not telling —
the hollow man in the parade, the empty bell still ringing.
The city has its pageantry of purpose and direction,
the morning stream of bodies moving in connection
with their calendars, their obligations, bright and forward-driven —
and he flows among them like a stone in a river, given
to the current without investment
in the destination or the purpose of the movement.
—
The office receives him like it receives the furniture —
a functional presence, the curator
of certain tasks that fill the hours and tick the boxes —
he populates the spreadsheets and empties the in-boxes.
The colleagues have their dramas and alliances, their friction,
the subtle jurisdiction
of ego and ambition — he navigates the edge of it,
close enough to functional, too hollow for the credit of it.
—
At lunch he takes his food outside when the weather cooperates,
sits at the bench beside the fountain, quietly operates
the machinery of eating without the weight of company —
twenty minutes in the sunlight, alone and almost free.
The free is not the freedom that he used to understand —
it’s the absence of the requirement to expand
into the social space that crowds him when the hours stretch too long —
the bench costs nothing, and it’s almost worth a penny.
—
The afternoon proceeds along its procedural intent,
the hollow man delivers what is needed on the line
of his specific duties and his general demeanor —
competent, presentable, reliable, and leaner
than he used to be in terms of what he gives the work.
The bare minimum of excellence. The adequacy of the shirk
that stops just short of visible, that keeps the hollowness inside —
the hollow man’s a professional in the management of hide.
—
The evening walk is shorter — home, the door, the couch, the screen,
the daily dissolution of whatever mask the day has been.
Alone he lets the posture go, lets the face fall to its real,
the hollow settling into its actual arrangement in the feel
of the room around him, the familiar quiet of the not-being-on —
and the hollow man at home is just a man who’s mostly gone
from the inside, just the housing and the habit and the shell.
A hollow man at rest, which is the hollow man the same.
—
The parade goes on. It always goes. The hollow man included,
another day of surface and of nothing much concluded.
The walk resumes at dawn with boots and coffee and the door —
the hollow man’s parade, same as the night before.
He has marched so long in the parade of the alive
that the marching is the man now, and the hollow is the drive.
He doesn’t know the man before the marching anymore.
The hollow man’s parade is what the hollow man is for.
The hollow isn’t something that a man can fill by choosing.
It came in through the years like a slow, considered bruising —
the accumulation of the not-quite-there and the almost-but-not-been.
And the hollow is the space between the man and what he’s seen.
The parade provides the structure of a life that reads as present.
The hollow man in the parade is technically pleasant,
achieves the basic metrics of a man who is among the living.
And the parade is the accounting of the hollow man’s thanksgiving.