Five short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and still the poem manages to build a whole figure: a man far from home, unsure of his welcome, who reaches out to others only at a distance. The title gives a surname, and the setting of Tangier points toward the writer William S. Burroughs, who is known to have lived there. The poem never says so, so it is safest to treat the speaker as a mask: a voice speaking in his name, or about him, from inside his isolation. Whatever the exact relationship, the poem is about being a stranger in a place that has no obvious use for you, and about the small, oblique gestures of connection such a person might make.
The first stanza has no complete sentence. "alone in far Tangier" is a condition rather than an action. "who will have me" hangs without a question mark, so it can be read as a plain question, a plea, or a wry shrug. The missing punctuation lets the line carry all three. "Far" matters too. It is measured from somewhere else, so even as the speaker names his location, he is looking back at the place he left. Then comes the poem's most striking image: "a bird in a theater of flags." The flags suggest a crossroads of nations, and the word "theater" turns the city into a stage where identities are displayed and performed. The speaker is a bird: small, watchable, free to fly in principle, but perched among symbols of belonging that are not his. The image is both colorful and lonely. A bird among flags is a living thing surrounded by banners, and none of them claim him.
The second stanza finally brings in a verb of action and the first "I": "at night I send a token hand / among the poor." The grammar is odd and revealing. He does not go among the poor. He sends a hand, as though part of him could be detached and dispatched. "Token" works in several ways. It can mean a symbolic gesture, a coin or counter, or something so minimal it is almost an insult, as in "tokenism." The speaker seems aware that his offering is partial and perhaps inadequate. The phrase "at night" adds ambiguity. It could be charity, curiosity, appetite, or a mix of all three, and the poem refuses to decide. Judging by the imagery, the disembodied hand also suggests a writer, since a hand is what writes. Perhaps the "token" is the written page itself, sent out from a distance. That reading is an inference, but the poem's compression invites it.
The sound of the lines supports the sense. The first line falls almost into a regular iambic rhythm ("a-LONE in FAR tan-GIER"), steady and a little formal, like someone trying to keep composure. The third line speeds up into a lilting, anapestic roll ("a BIRD in a THEA-ter of FLAGS"), which gives the image a light, fluttering motion. The fourth line, "at NIGHT i SEND a TO-ken HAND," is a clean iambic tetrameter, the most regular line in the poem, and it lands exactly where the action finally happens. Then the last line shrinks to two beats, "a-MONG the POOR," and stops short. The poem has no rhyme, which suits its theme: nothing answers, nothing closes the loop. Even so, the alliteration of "far" and "flags," and the echo between "Tangier" and "poor" at the ends of the stanzas, give the sparse language a faint thread of music.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves out. There is no explanation of why the speaker is in Tangier, no confession, no moral. Instead there is a contrast between two images, a bird in a theater and a hand among the poor, one about being looked at and the other about reaching out. Between them the speaker is both spectator and performer, outsider and intruder. The title, a single name standing in for a whole self, adds to the effect: the person is reduced to a label, much as the speaker is reduced to a bird and then to a hand. In five lines the poem asks a hard question about what it means to belong somewhere, and what it costs to be near people without being truly with them.