The Reflection Without A Pulse Poem by Dan Katoha Jr

I. The Heartless Character

He walks into the scene, soundless, lightless,
A hollow gaze, a hand clenched around silent prayers.
He doesn't love. He plays. He destroys.
His laugh is a mask, his silence a blade.
They call him hero,
But in his movements, there's only the cold machinery of survival.

He breaks hearts like one shatters glass:
Without emotion, without remorse, without return.
He is the shadow of a man without seasons,
An autumn without leaves, a summer without sun.
He kisses without trembling,
Leaves without looking back.

They say he once suffered —
But he says nothing.
His heart? Maybe a nameless graveyard
Where every feeling is buried alive.
Even love, he stared it down…
And turned away.

He has become what we fear:
A walking void, a fire without heat.
He doesn't feel.
He functions.
He lives… or imitates life.

And I, the one who shaped this ghost?
I look into his eyes…

And I see my own.

II. The Heartless Author

I write like one screams in silence,
With a pen dipped in the ink of regret.
I speak of love, but I can't feel it anymore.
I describe pain, yet no longer cry.

I gave my characters the life I never lived,
Sorrows I endured, but never learned to say.
Every word is a hidden confession,
A dirty bandage on an open wound.

Me too, I've lost my heart.
Or perhaps I sold it...
To the page.
To that cursed muse who drains me to feed my lines.

I'm that guy who speaks of love
But can't hold on to it.
The one who preaches redemption
Yet quietly condemns himself.

They read me and say, 'It's beautiful.'
But no one sees the storms behind my nights.
No one knows that I too am
That empty character…
Waiting to be written with a heart he no longer owns.

III. The Echo of the Void

The character has no heart.
What a shame.

The author doesn't either.
And that's worse.

One lives on the page.
The other, in the margins.

One kills to forget.
The other writes to avoid dying.

They're too much alike.
Same voice inside, same desert in their veins.
One is fiction…
The other, contradiction.

But together, they become a legend.
A shattered mirror between two realities.
One bleeds in ink,
The other in silence,
And their sorrows blend like two tears on the same face.

They love each other without knowing,
Hate each other without leaving.
The character is the echo of the author,
And the author the scream of the character.

They are one.
They are void.
They are the poem you just read —
And you won't walk away from it unchanged.


According to Katoha Jr.