The speaker lies in a jail cell, looking up at the bottom of an empty bunk above him. The steel is pierced with small drilled holes, and he sees the ceiling as a sky. Over that sky, someone has scratched crude sexual drawings, which he treats as stars. These are the marks of earlier prisoners, left to fill the time and the loneliness.
What surprises him is the tenderness in them. He calls the figures "sweet" and "incredibly innocent," even though the drawings are pornographic. The final lines explain why: the position of the hands gives away love. Whatever the artist meant to draw, the gesture of touching shows a longing for closeness, not just lust.
The mood is quiet, wistful and oddly gentle. The speaker is confined and alone, yet he finds beauty in rough graffiti. The short, broken lines feel like a man noticing things slowly, with nothing else to do but look.