The poem is only a few lines long, but it paints a bleak picture of a card player caught in a cycle. The opening line, "chance is a wan meat," says that luck is a poor kind of food. "Wan" means pale or sickly, so whatever the player gets from gambling is thin and unsatisfying, yet it is still something they keep chewing on.
The next two lines move from "cards / to cards again," which suggests the same motion repeated with no way out. The speaker seems to watch this habit with a quiet, tired detachment rather than loud judgment. The final image is the strangest: "lost as a kiss at prayers." A kiss during prayer might be a moment of devotion, but here it is lost, wasted or misplaced. The comparison hints that the player's attention, and maybe their tenderness or faith, has slipped away into the game. The mood is dry, lonely, and a little eerie, like a small confession about wanting something that never feeds you.