Before anything happens in this poem, something screams. "Screeching NYC" is a complete image on its own line, and it is the city itself that screeches. Only then does "macaws" arrive on a line of its own, as if the poem had gone looking for a comparison and landed on the loudest, brightest, least native bird it could think of. Parrots also repeat what they hear, so the word may hint at a city of people squawking each other's phrases back and forth. The poem never says so. It simply drops the noise in front of us.
The third line, "clothesline to oblivion," is the strangest. A clothesline is an ordinary, slightly shabby object, the kind of thing strung between city windows. "Oblivion" is a huge, almost operatic word. Putting them together makes a joke and a threat at once. The line might lead nowhere, or the whole crowded, noisy city might hang on it and drift off into nothing. There is also a quiet pun available, since a "line" is what a poet writes, and this one trails off toward oblivion as it goes. That reading is my inference, but the short, dangling line seems to invite it.
Then comes the poem's pivot, alone on its own line: "Move to Hollywood." It is an order, with no reason and no explanation, delivered like a tip from a friend or a telegram. The white space around it makes it sound both decisive and a little absurd. The poem treats leaving New York for Hollywood as an obvious next step, almost a reflex, the way one answers a screech by running somewhere else.
The final stanza reads like a morning routine. "Get up in the morning / jump into your overalls" is cheerful and brisk, and "jump" makes dressing sound like a cartoon. Overalls are the clothes of farm work, so a fresh start in Hollywood seems to involve playing the part of a rural, honest worker. The word "costume" never appears, but in that setting the overalls can hardly be anything else. Then the third instruction turns the whole routine on its head: "chop down your own fruit trees." Fruit trees suggest growth, nourishment, perhaps even Eden. The word "own" makes the act worse, because these are trees you planted or inherited, and you are cutting them down yourself. The tone does not change. The speaker is as breezy about the chopping as about the overalls, and that flatness is where the humor and the unease both come from.
The sound of the poem supports this contrast. There is no rhyme anywhere, and no regular meter. The first stanza is jagged and stressed: "Screeching NYC" lands in heavy beats, with the letters N-Y-C each pronounced separately, and "macaws" is a single hard syllable. The last stanza is looser and more rhythmic. "Get up in the morning" has an easy, walking pace, and "chop down your own fruit trees" ends on two stresses that fall like axe blows. A few small echoes tie things together, such as the long "o" in "clothesline," "oblivion," "overalls" and "own." Even so, the poem's main music comes from the shift from squawk to chant.
What the poem leaves out is as important as what it includes. The title is simply "Poem," a deadpan shrug that explains nothing. Nothing in the text tells us who is speaking or why the move is needed, so each reader has to supply the story. One reading is that this is a satire of reinvention, in which a person flees a loud, tired life, puts on a new costume, and destroys the very thing that could have fed them. Another is that chopping down the trees is a joyful act of liberation from expectations of growth and usefulness. The poem supports both, and it may be that the speaker does not know which is true either.
That openness is what makes the poem worth studying. In nine short lines, it works with abrupt juxtaposition, a shifting rhythm and an unchanging tone. It shows that a poem can be funny and bleak at once, and that an instruction can reveal more about the person giving it than about the person receiving it.