Five short lines, one sentence, and a title that is already a small joke. "Camp Jejune" sits one letter away from Camp Lejeune, the name of an American military base, but it also holds the word "jejune," which means naive, dull, or thin. The word comes from a Latin term meaning "fasting," which happens to suit a poem about someone living on rice. Before the first line begins, we know what kind of camp this is: a plain, underfed one.
The speaker goes into a tent and "become[s]" something, a verb that promises transformation. What they become is "simple and quiet," and at first this sounds like peace, the usual reward for leaving everything behind. But the poem keeps going, and the tone turns. The speaker is also "unoriginal" and "worn as a wit / seen twice." The central idea is that stripping life down has a cost as well as a calm. Without an audience, cleverness has nothing to do, and the self shrinks to something ordinary. The poem doesn't say whether this is a loss or a relief, and it is more honest for leaving that open.
The phrase "with rice, unoriginal" is the hinge. The line break and comma let "unoriginal" attach to the rice, which is a staple, a plain food of identical grains. It can just as easily describe the speaker, who has become one grain among many. Rice is a good choice of image because it is white, quiet, and unremarkable, and nobody boasts about it. The speaker has not simply eaten it. They have taken on its qualities.
The final simile is the sharpest. A "wit seen twice" is a joke whose punchline you already know, or a performance you have sat through before. The odd word is "seen." We usually hear wit, so "seen" suggests something staged, or something that has been seen through. "Worn" works double duty as well. It suggests clothes and canvas, the weathered gear of camping, and it suggests exhaustion. The speaker is shabby in two senses at once.
The poem's sound carries the same idea. There is no regular meter. My count of the lines runs roughly six, five, seven, five, and two syllables, so the rhythm is closer to speech than to song. But a long "i" sound threads through it: "I," "quiet," "rice," "twice." The speaker's own pronoun is echoed in the words that follow, as if the self were being slowly converted into a grain and a repetition. "Rice" pauses in the middle of line three, and "twice" closes the poem. That near-rhyme is itself something heard twice, so the form acts out the stale joke it describes.
The lines also shrink toward silence. The longest word in the poem is "unoriginal," five syllables, and it is used to claim that nothing fancy remains. That is a gently comic irony, since the most elaborate word describes plainness. The last line, "seen twice," is the shortest, and it lands like a punchline that has already lost its force. The only punctuation inside the poem is a single comma, so the sentence moves forward without ornament until it simply stops.
This is where the poem's cleverness gets interesting. A poem that calls itself a worn-out wit is, by saying so, being witty, and freshly. The self-mockery is the joke, and it is a good one. That keeps the poem from sinking into the dullness it describes. Its speaker may feel unoriginal, but the poem about that feeling is not.
What makes it worth reading is how much it fits into so little space and how it resists the obvious move. A poem about retreating to a tent might be expected to promise revelation, a clearer view of the stars or a purer self. This one reports something humbler and probably truer: when you take away your comforts and your audience, you may find quiet, but you may also find that you are less distinctive than you thought. The poem lets that sit in the air without comment, and it is memorable for that restraint. It also shows that a title, a pun, and a handful of plain words can open a surprising amount of thought.