Dated "Jan 1," the poem reads like a New Year's morning in the mind: a fresh start, but a restless one. It opens with the brain as an "industrious essay," not yet inked and full of hope. Then the body takes over. The heartbeat becomes a creature that rolls, gallops, gambles and doubles back, and the speaker seems to drift through a hazy, social scene where someone named Jim, and everybody else, keeps mentioning purple.
The repeated "and given" sounds like someone setting up a proof, but the logic never lands. Instead, thoughts keep forming and reforming, like skywriting that smears as soon as it is written. The question "boys will you burn the leaves?" floats in like a half-remembered voice.
The ending turns suspicious. The speaker calls the brain an "industrious thing" that "can't be trusted." The mood is playful and woozy, with a note of unease: the mind that makes our plans and resolutions may be the least reliable part of us.