A man chases a young gecko out of his room, and a day later asks it to come back. The poem carries a place and a date, Alappuzha and 2012, like an entry in a diary, and it reads like one: unpolished, confessional and a little amused at its own expense. Its central idea is that loneliness strips away our dignity and our sense of what counts as company. When the need is great enough, a lizard will do, and the speaker can admit it.
The opening stanza is almost slapstick. The gecko slips through the gap "between the door ajar and the wall," hides behind the desk, then bolts "like lightning" to the pile of papers. The speaker plays along, imagining the animal "presumably / Catching his breath." That word shows a man projecting human feelings onto a reptile, and enjoying it. His "Gotcha, my boy" is gruff but oddly fatherly, and "escorted him out" is a courteous phrase for an eviction. The sun he sends the gecko into is "glaring," a harsh place for a small creature used to corners.
Then the mood turns on "That was yesterday." The quick verbs (moved, pulled, brushed) give way to heavy abstractions: "suffocating sensation," "the revulsion of solitude." Revulsion is normally what we feel toward something outside us, so applying it to solitude suggests the speaker is disgusted by his own condition. He is trapped in a contradiction, "shunning company" while lacking "love and friendship." The inverted line "sans I am, of love and friendship" sounds stiff and formal, as if he were dressing his pain in clothes too grand for it. The triple "defeated, depressed and disconsolate" piles up near-synonyms, and the slight theatricality seems deliberate. The poem lets him wallow, then punctures the mood.
The puncture is the gecko, who has come back and is entirely at ease. He "skulked in a corner, nodding, licking his chops clean / Of the remains of a fly." Every detail contrasts with the speaker's collapse. The gecko has an appetite, a meal and no self-pity. "Chops" is a cheerfully colloquial word, and "cocking his head" gives him a dog's curiosity, as though he were asking what all the fuss is about. Earlier the speaker lent the gecko human feelings. Now the gecko is the one holding the room together.
The last line stands alone: "Welcome, my Achilles, welcome, brighten my lonely evenings." Naming a creature a few inches long after the Greek warrior is mock-heroic, and the joke is partly on the speaker. But the possessive "my" and the repeated "welcome" are sincere. The grand name gives the visitor, and perhaps the host, some worth. The verb "brighten" also answers the earlier "glaring sun." The light the speaker wants is not blazing but small and domestic, something that shares his evening.
The form suits this. The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre, and its long, loose lines sound like speech. Its stanzas shrink from five lines to three, then three, then three, and finally one, so the poem narrows toward that single line, like one figure in a quiet room. The structure is also a neat reversal: the man who was eager to remove the gecko in the first half is the one who pleads in the second.
The poem matters because of how it handles an uncomfortable feeling. It could have been a lament, but it takes the sting out of loneliness with humor and lets the humor make the sadness believable. It also leaves one thing open: the gecko never answers. He only nods and tilts his head, and the invitation hangs there. Whether the speaker has found a companion or only an audience is left for the reader to decide.