Being told to cheer up is rarely cruel, and that is what makes this short poem by Balachandran V so unsettling. Nobody in it shouts. A man is asked, "politely," to stop writing "sob-stuff" and to write about happiness instead. The poem follows what happens when the speaker tries to obey, and its answer is quietly horrifying: forced cheerfulness doesn't cure sadness, it hollows the person out.
The opening stanza is built from courtesy. The other man speaks "politely" and then "kindly," yet the speaker says he "turned further morose." The politeness is the wound. The phrase "sob-stuff" belongs to the other speaker, and its dismissive tone treats grief as a messy by-product rather than something worth saying. The most interesting words come at the end of the stanza: "Regret I cannot take anything away / From what you write." Read plainly, it means the man cannot alter the speaker's work. Judging by the clipped, formal phrasing, though, it also sounds like the language of a rejection note, and "take anything away" can be heard two ways, as accepting nothing or as being unable to lift the sorrow. The poem never says who "he" is, and that vagueness helps. He could be anyone who prefers poems, or people, to be pleasant.
In the second stanza the speaker acts. He goes "rummaging through my trunk," an image of old belongings stored away, and finds a "faded, forgotten mask / Of good cheer." Each adjective counts. A mask that is faded and forgotten suggests a cheerfulness once worn often and long since given up, or at least worn out. The line "Of good cheer" is very short and stands by itself, as if the mask were being held up for inspection. Then comes "Clasping it over my face," a verb that sounds less like dressing than like gripping, almost like fighting for it to stay on.
What follows is the poem's sharpest irony. "I felt good, looking in the mirror / Because I was grinning / From ear to ear." The logic is backwards. He feels good because he sees a grin, not the other way round. Happiness has become something to be checked in a mirror, a matter of appearance. "From ear to ear" is a tired idiom, and the poem lets it go slightly sinister, because a smile stretched that wide starts to look less like joy than like a fixed shape.
The final stanza, only three lines, turns the poem. "But then, queerly, the reflection / Had empty sockets / Where my eyes should've been." The word "queerly" is an understated, almost old-fashioned way of reacting to something terrible, as if the speaker were too stunned to find a stronger word. The contraction "should've" keeps the voice conversational, so the horror arrives in an ordinary tone, which makes it feel more real. The image reaches back to the title, "Empty." Eyes are traditionally where feeling shows, and without them the grin has nothing behind it. The "empty sockets" also recall a skull, so the mask of cheer ends up looking like death.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat, and that suits its subject. The lines run like speech, with enjambments such as "take anything away / From what you write" that make the voice sound hesitant, even wounded. The stanzas shrink from five lines to seven to three. The long middle stanza, where the speaker does the pleasing thing, is the poem's most active stretch, and the brief final stanza snaps shut on it like a trap.
The poem matters because it handles a familiar pressure with great restraint. Many people are told, kindly, to be more positive, and many artists are told that readers want brighter material. The poem doesn't argue back angrily. It obeys, and lets the mirror report the result. Ironically, those eleven plain lines of "sob-stuff" are more affecting than any cheerful verse would have been, because they show what is lost when sorrow is covered over instead of spoken. The speaker ends with the smile the man asked for and with nothing behind his eyes.