Thirteen short lines, one sentence, almost no punctuation: Ray Bremser's poem moves the way a bad night does, with no place to stop and breathe. The title sets the scene, a room and a drug withdrawal, and the poem pushes outward from that cramped space to a claim about everyone. Its central idea is that we control far less than we think. The one thing left to us, our attitude, is also what gives way when the pressure is highest.
The opening line, "Now let's line out agony", is chatty and almost businesslike, as if the speaker is about to get down to work. "Line out" is a pun on the poet's task, since a poem is agony set out in lines. It may also glance at the lines of drug-taking, though that is an inference. Then comes the room: "1890 furnished room bare / of schmeck." "Schmeck" looks like a cousin of "smack", slang for heroin, which fits the title. The paradox in "furnished room bare" does a lot of work. The room has its bed and chairs, yet it is empty of the one thing the speaker needs. The date also suggests an old rooming-house, worn by decades of lodgers who came and went, though the poem never says so.
"Her gone" is deliberately ambiguous. It could be a lover who has left, or the drug itself personified as a woman who has abandoned the speaker. The poem never settles it, and the doubt is productive, because in withdrawal the two losses would feel much the same. Either way, she has gone "down the cataract of / abstract force", and here the language lifts from slang to philosophy. A cataract is a huge waterfall, and the word echoes in "abstract" through the shared "-act" sound. The match makes the falling water and the faceless "force" seem like one thing. That force "pours / around us all," so the private crisis becomes a general condition. It also "makes / these leaps we don't / control". The word "leaps" could describe the jolts of a body in withdrawal, or the unpredictable lurches of a whole life.
Then the line break does something clever. "Control" sits alone on its line, a single word with nothing around it. Because there is no punctuation, it leans forward into the next line, so we can read "control / nothing but our attitude." We control nothing but our attitude. Or we can stop at "control" and start fresh with "nothing but our attitude / is ours." Both readings arrive at the same bleak bargain. The speaker allows himself one possession, a stance toward what is happening, and the poem seems to offer it as a small dignity.
Even that is taken back. The pronouns narrow from "us all" to "my", and the speaker admits, "now my / mental anchor slips / from the muck of / time." This image completes the water imagery that runs through the poem: cataract, pours, leaps, anchor. We picture someone anchored in a river above a waterfall, the anchor dragging loose, the current taking hold. "Muck" is an ugly, unromantic word for the seabed. It makes time sound like silt and mud, something sticky that holds us in place only until it lets go. The poem stops on "time" and the period, its only full stop, so the drift is cut off rather than resolved.
There is no rhyme and no regular beat. The short lines break in awkward places ("cataract of," "don't," "muck of"), ending on small hinge words so the reader keeps tipping forward into the next line. The ampersands and the casual "let's" keep the voice rough and spoken, and it sits oddly beside the abstract vocabulary. That clash between street slang and metaphysics is the poem's character: the speaker is both inside the sweating room and trying to understand it from above.
The poem is significant for how much it fits into so little space. It does not describe withdrawal symptom by symptom. It turns the experience into a model of helplessness, then tests the idea that attitude can save us, and lets the answer remain uncertain as the anchor slips.