Somewhere in the dark, a speaker sits beside a turtle pond and cannot switch his thoughts off. That is nearly the whole situation of BomberJacknut's «What, You Egg?», and much of its charm lies in how little it dresses that situation up. Nothing happens. He leaves a noisy gathering, walks, returns to the water, and puts questions to himself that he can't answer. The poem is about the particular tiredness of overthinking, of worrying "for the future / about the past / and evermore the present" until every tense of life is a source of anxiety. Its central idea is that this restlessness has no audience and no cure, only company that happens to be asleep.
That company is the poem's one steady image. "The turtles are asleep" returns four times, shifting its connecting word from "as" to "and" to "while" and then "while" again. The refrain works like a heartbeat, or like a thought that keeps circling back, and the changing conjunctions let it attach to different moods. The first time, it is oddly tied to logic: "There is no rhyme, / no reason, / and no sense / as the turtles are asleep." It is as if the sleeping animals were the only ones who could supply meaning, and their unconsciousness has cancelled it. Turtles suit the role. We tend to think of them as slow, patient and able to withdraw into a shell, which is everything the sleepless speaker is not. Their silence also leaves his questions without a single reply.
The form copies the mind it describes. The poem is one unbroken block with no stanza breaks, so there is no pause for the speaker to rest in. The lines are short and conversational, often only three or four beats, which makes the voice sound like muttering aloud. The first line announces "no rhyme," and the poem mostly keeps its word. It is free verse, though sound still creeps in. "Meet" and "street" chime a few lines apart, and the long *e* of "asleep," "weary" and "street" hums through the middle section like a faint tune he can't quite place.
The most distinctive feature is the clash of registers. The speaker reaches for archaic words such as "oft," "naught," "mayhap," "perchance" and "evermore," and the lines briefly take on the sound of an old lament. Then plain modern speech cuts in: "I'm just some guy / slouching at a pool." The effect is partly comic, since the speaker seems to know he is being a little theatrical, and partly honest. The old words let him dignify his gloom, and the casual ones puncture it. The same swing appears in the images. "Muse of calls / and drunken babble" and "the blaring of the tunes / and the bustle of the street" make the outside world loud, yet he says he finds "naught but weary silence." The noise surrounds him without reaching him, so the silence is inside him. The phrase "my presence comforts not" suggests that even moving through a crowd leaves him unaccompanied.
The final movement turns to questions. "Do I think myself a fool? / Do I think myself used / or perhaps misunderstood?" The repeated "Do I" makes them sound like an inner cross-examination. Then comes the neatest twist: "Do I really qualify / to ask all this of myself?" He is doubting his right to doubt, a loop that anyone who has lain awake rehearsing a conversation will recognise. The poem's answer is a shrug, and the shrug may be a relief: "maybe it doesn't matter / and it never ever did." The small word change from "pond" to "pool" fits this deflation. The place shrinks along with his sense of his own importance.
That refusal to resolve is what makes the poem worth reading. It offers no epiphany and no dawn, and the speaker does not decide anything. He ends where he began, in the dark, with the turtles still asleep. The poem's value is in recognition. It takes a mood most readers have felt, the late-night spiral of worry, self-judgment and sudden indifference, and renders it plainly, with a wry humour that keeps it from self-pity. Its ending doesn't fix the speaker's problem, but by setting it down on the page the poem gives the restlessness a shape, and a mind that can see its own loop with a half-smile is a little less trapped by it.