The first line is a joke with a trapdoor in it. The speaker has "lost the letter I in a card game," a gambler's bad luck that is also a bit of grammar, since "I" is both a letter and the word for the self. The line has no subject, and so does the next: "& wake up still a little drunk." From the opening, the speaker is missing from his own sentences. The title, "Waking Up Dead," makes the stakes plain. This is a hangover morning described as a small death, or perhaps a small resurrection that hasn't quite worked.
What follows is a catalogue of a world seen too clearly and understood too little. The sky is "the proverbial world / of hurt," a tired cliché the speaker half-apologizes for with "proverbial," as if his head can only manage borrowed phrases. The contrails "fade slowly, / much too slowly," and the line break lets the second "slowly" hang there, as slow as the morning feels. The laundry on the line is the poem's best moment of attention. The speaker can "make out / every word," and the words are colours: "Red. Black. / Blue. The dark wash." Clothes become a text, and the full stops make each colour land like a bruise. "Dark wash" is the label on a pair of jeans, but it also sounds like a smear of mood across the whole scene.
The second stanza turns inward and gets stranger. "But where is everybody?" is a small, lonely question, and the poem never answers it. The light bulb, "fresh out of ideas, / even bad ones," borrows the cartoon image of the bright idea and shows it burnt out. Then the speaker drifts into the third person: "This body wants to be thumbed through / like someone's bedtime reading." The "I" has dissolved into "this body," a thing to be handled, read and put down. The book is described lovingly, with "broken-down leather," "dog-eared pages," and edges of "ineradicable gilt." The dash that follows delivers the surprise: the gilt is "the sun through closed eyelids." Anyone who has lain awake with their eyes shut against a bright window knows that red-gold glow. In one image a hangover discomfort becomes something valuable and permanent, like gold leaf on an old Bible. The word "ineradicable" is the nearest the poem comes to hope. Some brightness cannot be rubbed out, even by a bad night.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its rhythm is that of someone muttering to himself, with long, rolling sentences punctured by fragments ("Red. Black."), a bare "Jesus." on a line of its own, and ampersands that give the page a casual, scribbled look. The lines break where a tired mind might stop for breath, which keeps the tone conversational even when the images turn lyrical. The word "Jesus" works in two ways. It is an everyday groan, and it also sits oddly beside a title about waking from death, so a flicker of resurrection comedy comes through.
The ending is quietly clever. "This would be a damn sight easier / if I still made sense." The "I" has crept back, but only inside an "if" clause, in a hypothetical about being coherent. "Sense" carries two meanings here. It is meaning, the thing the speaker has lost, but it is also the senses, the very thing the poem has been using so richly, with its sky, its colours and the glow behind the eyelids. The speaker cannot make sense, yet he is nearly overwhelmed by sensation. The word "still" also returns from the second line ("still a little drunk," "still made sense"), so the poem ends where it began, in a condition that hasn't lifted.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It treats a rough morning with humour, but the humour is the kind that keeps something sadder at bay. By losing and half-recovering its own first-person pronoun, it turns a small disaster into a lively picture of what it feels like when the self doesn't quite come back with the daylight.