Nothingness

When dusk shall claim my hollow breath,

And I must tread the vale of death,

No tear shall fall, no mourner cry,

I was unseen beneath this sky.

A phantom veiled in mortal guise,

I passed through life with vacant eyes.

No echo lingers where I tread,

No soul will note that I am dead.

No void shall haunt the hearts I've known,

For I was shadow, skin, and bone.

No tender hand upon my skin,

No warmth to stir the fire within.

A passenger on paths grown cold,

Unloved, unheard, and never told,

No joy, no light, no sacred fire,

Just silence draped in funeral choir.

This year, I whisper my last breath,

A prophet of my coming death.

Farewell cruel world, so proud, so bare,

You never looked. You never cared.

Reviews

[Michael Sun Bear]

Hello Milena, I just came home from a week spent in a locked down psych ward, a mental health unit, and your poem could be my roommate speaking. It makes your poem all the more devastating for me. Your poem is so dark, so haunting, so lacking in hope or joy, I wonder how much of this is you, and how much is a fiction of your imagination. My feelings aside, it reads quite well, well done. I will continue to explore your work; I hope to find a lighter you.

[Neha agrawal]

Your poem is a stark and devastating elegy of invisibility, echoing the sorrow of a soul who feels not just unloved, but unnoticed — the emotional weight lands not in rage or despair, but in resignation. That’s what makes it so haunting: the speaker doesn’t plead for attention, they simply accept their absence from the world as fact.

> “No echo lingers where I tread, / No soul will note that I am dead.”
This couplet stands out — it encapsulates the central ache: not the fear of death, but the fear of being unremembered and unseen, even in passing.



Your language is elegant and refined — a classical rhythm that mirrors traditional elegies or Romantic odes. It feels like something a ghost might write while watching the world forget them, line by line. The rhyme scheme (couplets) keeps it tight and almost hymn-like — reinforcing the feeling of a funeral dirge.

> “A phantom veiled in mortal guise, / I passed through life with vacant eyes.”
This line is devastatingly visual. It paints a clear image of emotional detachment — a person alive but never truly living.
This is a deeply melancholic and beautifully written poem. It doesn't ask to be pitied — and that’s exactly what makes it so moving. The quietness is its greatest weapon. You’ve managed to give voice to what many feel but cannot say: the fear of not being hated or loved, but simply... unnoticed.