Woelfersheim's poem puts us inside a panicked mind in the middle of the night. The speaker watches someone they love, someone with small hands and closed eyes, and sees them turning cold, blue, and bruised. The short, broken lines read like gasps, and the paired words at the end of each stanza (bleeding, screaming, leaving, dying) pile up the dread.
What makes the poem unsettling is that the speaker can't tell what's real. They can see the person breathing beside them, yet they also feel them in their veins, hear them screaming, and wonder if they're hallucinating. Love and terror are tangled together here; the speaker keeps loving this person even while imagining them dying.
The last stanza leaves the speaker sweating and crying. Then the single line, "It was just a dream," arrives. It brings relief, but it's oddly flat, and the fear it follows doesn't simply disappear. The mood is frantic, claustrophobic, and raw.