The poem moves like a memory that won't stay put. It begins with something small and intimate: a film playing behind a closed eyelid, the kind of image that appears when you try to sleep. Then it widens to a roomful of people, and afterwards a face pressed into a pillow. The speaker seems alone and upset, though the poem never says why. The word "irritant" is cold and clinical, as if the feeling is something stuck in the mind that can't be rubbed away.
Then smoke drifts in, and the setting shifts to a hut, a field of artillery, a fire of napalm. These lines suggest war, and the poem seems to link private distress with images of violence, as though the film behind the eyelid is a war film, or a memory of one. The short lines and wide gaps leave the reader hanging, much like the speaker. The mood is uneasy, numb, and haunted, with a quiet horror that builds without any outcry.