Wanting to be headless is usually a joke about stress, but the "we" in Brett Olsen's poem seems to mean it. They want to be mannequins so that "the noise upstairs" can be silenced while the body carries on. The metaphor turns a person into a house, with the head as the upper floor where someone paces and argues and never goes to bed. The poem is about the exhaustion of an overactive mind, and about the temptation to hand life over to something simpler: habit, the body, a parent, even the blankness of a shop-window dummy.
The first stanzas set up the split. Mind and body get separate jobs, and the grammar insists on it. The body "did what the body does," then the hands "did what hands do." The repetition is flat, almost bored, which makes the body sound like a machine that needs no supervision. The opening line stumbles too: "we both, wanted, to be" is broken up by commas, as if the admission is being made reluctantly. The detail of the mind washing the hands is odd. The mind isn't removed but given a small, clean task. Hand-washing can suggest guilt or compulsion, and the poem may be hinting at that, though it never says so. There is also an irony in the title. A mannequin does nothing, so the dream of a body that works fine without a head fails inside its own image.
Then "maybe as kids" sits alone on its line, a pause before memory. Childhood is a time when "every print our feet made / was something inconceivable," and each step was new. Adulthood arrives through texture: "wrinkles," then a "road not taken" that "already had hand-printed cement." The phrase echoes Robert Frost's famous poem, but here the choice is spoiled. Someone has pressed their hands into the path before you, so there is nothing original left to do. Gum "stuck in the underneaths" adds grime, a view of the world from below. Then comes the child's logic: "what's the point in walking / when dad can / carry us home?" The break after "when dad can" leaves the line hanging, like a held breath. The wish for headlessness turns out to be partly a wish to be small again and carried, with no one steering.
The last three stanzas move to water. "There's no shame in / choosing deep waters" sounds defensive, as if answering an accusation. The dashes around "legs wiggling / to stay afloat" make the lines wobble the way a treading swimmer does. The reasoning that "if big waves are fun, / then bigger waves are better" is the logic of escalation. It could describe thrill-seeking or risk in general, but the poem doesn't say which. The final line, "we both hoped nothing below / would make us sink to their level," answers the opening. "Upstairs" was where the noise lived, and "below" is where the danger waits. The speakers hang in between, treading water. "Their level" is left vague, and it could mean the depths themselves or whatever lives there. The idiom of sinking to someone's level also brings in a hint of moral falling. The verb is "hoped," not "knew," so the poem ends on a wish rather than a promise.
The form suits that uncertainty. It is free verse in lowercase, with short lines, irregular stanzas and almost no rhyme. Its only music comes from repetition and parallel phrasing ("what the body does," "what hands do"). Without rhyme, nothing clicks shut, and the poem ends the way the speakers live, unresolved.
What makes it worth reading is how plainly it handles a very current feeling, the longing to stop thinking. Its images are ordinary ones: stairs, cement, chewing gum, a father's arms. It never names the noise or explains why it is so loud, so readers can fill the gap with their own version. The poem's quiet honesty is that it offers no cure. It shows two people wishing for an off switch and hoping, without much proof, that they won't go under.