Seventeen words, three lines, and not one of them says what the speaker feels. That is the point. The poem catches a moment of emotional static, when a person is close to someone and cannot tell what is going on inside. Its central idea is that the confusion is itself the feeling. The title, "Empty," is the only label the poem offers, and the speaker never claims it. The word sits above the lines like a verdict the speaker hasn't agreed to.
The grammar gives the first clue. The opening line, "Don't know how to think," has no subject. There is no "I" at the start, as if the speaker is too absent to appear in their own sentence. The "I" arrives only in the next line, and even then it comes with a shrug: "I just don't know what I feel." That small word "just" plays the problem down, as if it were nothing, while the repeated "don't know" says the opposite. The phrase appears twice in two lines, circling like someone pacing a room.
The two lines also divide the speaker's inner life into head and heart, and both fail. First thinking breaks down, then feeling. The usual advice for a confused person is to think it through or to listen to their feelings, and the poem quietly closes off both routes. Nothing is left to fall back on.
The trigger is held back until the last line: "When I am with her." The second line ends on a comma, so the sentence is still moving, and the reader expects an explanation. What arrives is a condition. It doesn't say why she causes this, or even whether she does. The emptiness might be the dizziness of feeling too much, or it might be the discovery that, in the presence of someone who ought to stir something, nothing stirs. Both readings fit the words, and the poem refuses to choose. "Empty" can mean hollow or blank, and being with her may have exposed that hollowness rather than created it.
The form is as bare as the content. There is no rhyme, so no chime of "feel" and "her" gives the lines a sense of resolution. The syllables do fall into a neat pattern of five, seven, five, the same count as a haiku. Whether that is design or accident, nothing in the text lets us say, and the poem has none of the nature imagery we associate with haiku. What the count does produce is compression. The lines are short and the middle one stretches slightly before the last snaps back. Then there is no full stop. The first line ends with one and the second with a comma, but the third just stops, so the thought hangs in the air like the speaker's feelings.
Every word in the poem is a single syllable: "Don't know how to think," "what I feel," "with her." This plain, clipped vocabulary sounds like speech from someone who can't find better words, or has stopped looking. There is no metaphor, no picture of a hollow room or a drained glass. The only image is the title's abstraction, and the reader has to fill the emptiness in. That choice is bold. A fancier poem would explain the feeling and so claim to understand it, whereas this one stays honest about the limits of what the speaker can say.
Then there is "her," the poem's final word and its only other character. She has no name, no description and no relationship to the speaker. She might be a girlfriend, a friend or a relative, and the poem doesn't settle it. This vagueness matches the speaker's own, because you can't define your feelings about someone you can't define. Ending on a pronoun also gives her the last, heaviest position in the poem, even though we learn nothing about her.
Nothing is offered about who wrote it or when, apart from the name Nebex, so the poem stands on its own, like a note scribbled down in the middle of confusion. Its significance lies in how much it gets from so little. Many people have felt this situation, and few poems admit so directly that they have no answer. The form doesn't describe the confusion so much as reproduce it: a missing subject, a repeated "don't know," a sentence that trails off. The reader is left to finish what the speaker cannot.