Bernheimer's speaker opens with a boast and ends with a flinch. The first stanza swaggers: "I've forgotten more / Than you'll ever know." By the last line the confidence has curdled into "The more uncomfortable I get." The poem's central idea is that experience does not bring ease. Seeing more, and perhaps knowing more, wears away the comfort the speaker once had, and the poem never settles whether that is a loss or a hard-won kind of wisdom.
The first stanza sets the scene as memory: "Nights as a kid" with "Eyelids peeled," as if the child stayed awake by force, eyes stripped of their covering. "Deep'sky" is an odd, clipped coinage, with the apostrophe swallowing a letter. It reads like a word worn down by handling, which suits a poem about forgetting. The boast is a paradox. The speaker brags about what has been lost, measuring himself by the amount he has forgotten rather than by what he has kept. "Drifting down the staggered lights" blends two images, stars scattered across a night sky and the uneven lamps of a road. The poem lets them blur together, and the blur is part of its method.
The second stanza piles up scraps: "Rhubarb, pieces of eight / Feet in the air." Pieces of eight are the coins of pirate lore, and the title, with its mention of Defoe, nudges us toward old tales of seafaring and adventure. Judging by the title, the poem sits "before" that kind of storytelling, where objects have not yet been arranged into a plot. "Rhubarb" is a wonderfully slippery word. It is a tart garden plant, and it is also the word actors mutter to fake crowd noise. Either way, it sounds like filler, language stripped of meaning, set beside the glamorous currency of adventure. "Feet in the air" might be a child lying on his back or something capsized. The poem declines to say, and the reader has to choose.
The structure does much of the thinking. There is no rhyme, and the lines are short and conversational, but there is a pattern. After the six-line opening come three tercets, and two of them contain the phrase "And the more I see" or "The more I see." The expectation set up by "the more… the more…" is that the second half will complete the thought. For two stanzas it doesn't. The phrase just repeats, like a person circling a thought they can't quite finish. Only in the final tercet does the pattern close, and the payoff is a feeling, not a fact: "the more uncomfortable I get." The grammar of accumulation ends in unease.
The third stanza adds the poem's most unsettling detail. "IQ getting filmy" sets a clinical abbreviation next to a soft, clouded adjective, as if intelligence were a windscreen or an eye fogging over. "Car lengths at a time" suggests slow, cautious progress through that fog. So the speaker sees more while seeing less clearly, a second paradox to match the first. Seeing, knowing and forgetting are bound up together.
The last stanza turns physical. "Surface tension" is the invisible skin that lets water hold its shape, and "rimfire" names a kind of cartridge, though it also sounds like fire along an edge. Both are about fragile boundaries and the danger of crossing them. Then comes the plainest line in the poem, "I need my fingers to be careful with," which ends on a dangling "with" that is more spoken than written. The speaker needs hands for delicate handling because the world now feels like something that could break or go off.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It offers no story and no explanation, only images that rub against each other: childhood sky, pirate coins, a clouded mind, a loaded cartridge. The meaning comes from the gaps between them, and the reader has to do the connecting, a small version of the speaker's own unsettling experience of seeing more and being less sure of it.