Sleeping Ace is sad, and nobody can tell us why. The opening sentence gives a name, a place and a mood, and the rest of the paragraph swerves away from explanation. What follows is a series of remarks, each one a little off-center from the last, and the sadness sits underneath them unexplained.
The nearest thing to a plot is a joke about money. His wife says, "Money can save you," and the narrator answers that this was "disappointing really, because Sleeping Ace already had millions." The logic is neat: if money were the cure, he would not be sad. But the poem doesn't stay with that clarity. The millions are placed "high above the earth's atmosphere where no one could wake them," so wealth becomes something that sleeps, like its owner, and is out of reach. Then the money becomes "little critters" whose "brightness ... was sense itself." Judging by the imagery, these could be stars, or coins, or both, but the poem never says. The only tender moment follows: "How frail they are, wondered Sleeping Ace. He did not say it though." The one feeling he has is the one he keeps back.
The poem is a block of prose, and its line breaks are set by the margin, not by sound. Words are cut in half ("soli-/tude," "it-/self"), so the ending of a line carries no weight. The rhythm comes from the sentences instead, which are flat, deadpan and a little like a tall tale. The full name "Sleeping Ace" is repeated again and again, where "he" would be more natural. That makes him feel less like a person and more like a figure in a story. His name sounds like a card-player's nickname, though that is only an impression. There is no rhyme, but repetition does some of the same work, as "wife" keeps coming back. Speech runs into narration without quotation marks ("Money can save you said his wife"), so no voice stands apart from the narrator's. Even the punctuation is slightly loose: a comma closes the sentence about the millions, and the next sentence starts with a capital letter, as if the thought had been dropped and picked up again.
The poem also uses the vocabulary of reasoning, with words like "because," "but," "though" and "before." These words promise that one thing follows from another, but they often connect things that barely touch. "Days, weeks of solitude will strengthen your hair as you make it grow" sounds like advice, but hair grows whether you are alone or not, so the sentence is wisdom in form only. Mrs. Sleeping Ace's line, "I'm getting an education just moving my car," shrinks a big word to a chore. It also sets her small activity against her husband, who "sat around and did nothing." They are in Texas together, yet he is "talking to his wife on the telephone," so the poem suggests a distance even inside the marriage.
The ending adds more puzzles. "Texas is too hot, they used to complain. That was before Sleeping Ace went into plane wreck ventures." The tense shifts, and the complaint is placed in the past, but we never learn what changed. Plane wrecks also echo the millions "above the earth's atmosphere": things high up eventually come down. The phrase "plane wreck ventures" sounds like business talk, which makes disaster sound like a line of investment. The poem stops there, with no lesson and no relief.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does with so little. Money, marital advice and education are the things people usually trust to fix a bad mood, and each is shown failing, mostly through tone and not through argument. The poem makes us feel that sentences can sound reasonable while saying nothing settled, and that this is also how people talk when they are unhappy and cannot say so. The humor is dry and the sadness never quite shows, and the reader is left to join the pieces.