Nothing in "corpse" is about a corpse, and that is where the poem gets its strange double life. The title, along with the tag «"Cold" -Eri», sets up a chill. The lines that follow are domestic and funny, almost a household anecdote. The poem lives in the gap between the two. A small creature complains that the world is too cold, goes looking for warmth, and ends up trapped in a heater that holds the one thing he can't stand.
The poem never says what Pudding is, but the clues point to a pet, probably a cat: the fur, the snuggling "on warm things," the horror of water. Pudding "has told us" about a former home, "a warm world where his fur would reflect the sun's heat." The speaker passes this on without a trace of mockery, and that tenderness drives the poem. A pet's habits get turned into an origin story. His bright fur "stands out" because he was built for a sunnier place, and now that fur is a leftover from a lost homeland. Reading between the lines, Pudding is a small exile in a house that doesn't suit him, and the household has decided to take his word for it.
The tense carries this. "Has told us," "used to live" and "tells us" belong to a myth-time of repeated stories. Then comes "Today," with its past tense and a specific event: "he crawled into the hot water heater and got stuck." The grand account of a vanished sun-world drops straight into a plumbing problem. The line breaks reinforce the drop. The first lines are long, explanatory and mostly end-stopped, like someone patiently relaying information. The lines that follow get shorter and more urgent.
Then the poem breaks apart on the page:
He really
Really
Really
Doesn't like water.
There is no rhyme anywhere in the poem, and it doesn't need any. The staggered indentation does the work a rhyme would. The eye steps rightward through each "Really," then jumps back for the punchline, so the repetition becomes a visual slide, perhaps the slow sinking of a body into a tight space. It also works as comic timing: the pause before the last line is the pause before the speaker admits what the problem actually is. The capitalised "Really," which would be lowercase in ordinary speech, gives each repeat the weight of a separate gasp.
The central irony is that the logic of the poem punishes itself. Pudding's whole philosophy is to find the warmest object available, and the hot water heater is exactly that. But heat in a house is stored in water, so his best idea puts him inside what he fears most. Comfort and dread end up in the same container. The words "warm" and "hot" pile up in the poem, while "water" appears only at the very end, as if the poem, like Pudding, doesn't see it coming.
This is where the title comes back. The word "corpse" never appears in the body of the poem, but it hangs over the funny scene like a shadow. A creature stuck in a heater is a comic image, yet the title makes a reader briefly wonder how serious it is. Cold is the word that links the tag, the title and Pudding's complaint, and a corpse is the coldest thing there is. The poem seems to be saying that the search for warmth is never quite a joke, even when it is told as one. Whether Eri intended that undertone I can't say, since the text gives only that single name and nothing else I could responsibly build on. But the pairing of title and anecdote invites it.
That is the poem's real achievement. In a handful of plain lines, it makes a small animal's absurd mistake into a portrait of longing: for a warmer world, for a safe place to curl up, for a household that listens when you explain where you come from. It is funny, and it is also faintly aching, and it never raises its voice to do either.