Six lines, no punctuation, no rhyme, and a title that does most of the pointing. "Porn addict" is a blunt, almost clinical label, the kind that might appear on a form. The poem under it never says anything explicit. It talks about granaries, fire, plenty and hands. That gap between a harsh name and an oblique, quiet body of text is where the poem's meaning sits. Addiction is presented as a paradox: the more there is to consume, the less is received.
The opening image is the strangest. "Among the granaries of sleep / I burn." A granary is where a harvest is stored against hunger, so it suggests safety, surplus and rest. Sleep is imagined as a whole row of such storehouses, full of what the speaker should be able to draw on. But the speaker is not resting among them; he is on fire. Grain stores really can ignite, so the image carries a hint of danger, as if the very place meant for security is where the damage happens. The line break is also effective. The long, smooth first line gives way to the two-syllable "I burn," which is as abrupt as a flare. Because there is no full stop, nothing contains it.
The second stanza is where the language starts to buckle. "Where such variety of pictures / I enjoy no pleasure in the sight of them" is not quite a grammatical sentence. The "where" opens a clause that never settles, and the line then doubles back on itself: "enjoy no pleasure" is a near-tautology, with the second word cancelling the first. Judging by the effect on the page, the stumbling syntax suits the subject. It reads like a mind circling and repeating itself, unable to complete a clean thought. The phrase "such variety" also sounds like a catalogue or a market stall, a consumer's word, and the flat, bureaucratic "pictures" drains the scene of any glamour. Nothing here is seductive. The speaker looks and feels nothing.
The final stanza states the paradox outright: "the greatest plenty turns / to absence in my hands." The enjambment on "turns" acts out the meaning, because the sentence swivels at the line break exactly as the abundance swivels into emptiness. "Plenty" also echoes the earlier "pleasure" and "pictures." The repeated *p* and *l* sounds create a kind of promise, and each of the words is then emptied. By the end the harvest has become "absence," an abstract, nearly weightless word, and it lands in "hands," the most physical word in the poem. Hands can grasp, hold and touch, so the closing image is of something that cannot be held. The speaker is surrounded by everything and keeps nothing, a situation close to the myth of Tantalus, though the poem never names that comparison.
A few key words work together across the poem. "Granaries," "burn," "variety" and "plenty" all belong to fields of harvest, fire and commerce, so desire is described through the language of abundance rather than through anything bodily. That is part of what makes the poem restrained. It never lectures, and it never lingers on the content of the images. The only moral judgment is the one the speaker passes on his own experience: it is joyless. The first-person "I" appears twice, in "I burn" and "I enjoy no pleasure," and each time it is attached to a loss, either burning or a lack of enjoyment. The poem's voice is flat and observational, closer to a confession made without self-pity than to a dramatic outburst.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. A reader could expect shame, titillation or a warning, and instead gets a precise description of how compulsion differs from desire. Desire expects satisfaction. Compulsion keeps going when the satisfaction has gone, which is why the speaker's abundance of choice feels like deprivation. The poem also leaves its title to carry the subject, which lets the six lines stay symbolic and compressed. It avoids the obvious ending, a resolution or a cure, and stops on "hands," so the reader is left with the image of the speaker's empty grip. For a student reading closely, the lesson is how a poem can say something uncomfortable by choosing its images carefully and trusting the white space around them.