The speaker is living alone in the forest and trying to talk himself into contentment. He says he once mistook dysphoria, a deep unease, for euphoria "on purpose," and the rest of the prose shows how that effort looks. An empty plate turns into a full moon. A mouse chewing up his old poems becomes a "companion animal." Each bit of cheerful reframing quietly gives away how bare things are.
The details keep sliding toward grief and waste: a cenotaph (a monument to someone whose body lies elsewhere) built from cigarette butts, a gutted television standing guard while he sleeps. The tone is dry and darkly funny, but the humor reads like a way of coping.
The closing haiku-like lines, "last cigarette / as long as grass grows / or rivers run," echo the language of old promises meant to last forever. Set beside a final cigarette, the phrase feels ironic, even sad. The mood is wry, lonely, and tender in an odd way.