Read the first line aloud and you can almost hear a switch clicking. "Off on and off again" has no punctuation to tell you where to breathe, so the words tumble into one another like a flickering bulb or a hesitant finger on a light switch. Nothing in the line says who or what is flickering. That gap is where the poem lives.
The title does the steering. Without "Indecision," the lines could describe a blinking sign, or, judging by the talk of something made "for view at night," even a firefly. With it, the on-and-off becomes a state of mind, a person who cannot commit. The word "again" matters here, because it turns one swerve into a loop. The line also begins and ends on "off," and "on" is the shortest, briefest moment, squeezed between two absences. Whatever is happening, the default it keeps falling back into is not-choosing. Even the grammar hesitates. "Off on" runs without a connecting word, and "and" shows up only for the second "off," as if the speaker gets a little firmer footing just in time to reverse.
The second line widens the picture. "Outfit" is an everyday, slightly casual word, the kind you use for what you pull out of a wardrobe. Suddenly "off on and off again" has another reading: putting clothes on, taking them off, trying something else, the familiar scene of someone who cannot decide what to wear. Indecision stops being abstract and becomes a small domestic drama. But "outfit" can also mean a set of equipment, and the poem never says which sense it wants. Both stay switched on at once.
Then comes the odd phrase "for view." We would expect "for viewing" or "to be seen." "View" as a bare noun sounds more like a display, something staged for an audience. The indecision is not private after all. It is dressed up and put on show. The poem's quiet joke is that hesitation, normally something we hide, has been tailored into a costume. Night intensifies this. A flicker is most visible in the dark, so darkness is where on and off matter most, and where an outfit has to work hardest to be noticed.
The construction supports all this. The poem has no rhyme, no capital letters, no punctuation, and, strikingly, no finite verb. Nothing is actually done. Line one is a string of states, and line two is a noun phrase waiting for a sentence that never arrives. The grammar withholds action, so the poem enacts the paralysis it names. The sounds are subtle but deliberate-seeming. "Off" appears twice and is echoed inside "outfit," so the f sound flickers through both lines, and "outfit" and "night" close on the same hard t. The lines are close in length, roughly six syllables and seven. The first is jittery, made almost entirely of one-syllable words, while the second opens with the only multi-syllable word, "outfit," and settles into the long vowel of "night." The ending slows the rhythm as if the flickering has finally stopped. But it stops in darkness, which is arguably just another "off."
The poem's significance lies in how much it asks of so little. It packs a psychological state into an image anyone recognises, a light switch or a wardrobe, and refuses to say which one it means. The reader ends up hesitating too, flipping between the readings, light or clothing, private or displayed, and so experiences the poem's subject instead of just being told about it. A longer poem about indecision might have deliberated at length. Here the brevity is the argument. Two short lines are enough to show that being undecided is a pattern that repeats, and that it can look, from the outside, like a performance.