The poem opens with a blunt complaint: life on this "rogue world" is drudgery. "Rogue" suggests a planet adrift, unmoored and unpredictable, though it could also mean a world that behaves like a scoundrel. Either way, the speaker feels stuck on it without much hope.
The three similes that follow read like a list of small humiliations. A dying man's ejaculation is a last, futile burst of life. Looking into a mirror and finding an ape suggests a shock of self-recognition, a sense of being less dignified than we imagine. The final image is the quietest and perhaps the saddest: resolving to get up tomorrow in order to write. The speaker's own creative work seems to belong on the same list of burdens, a promise that feels both necessary and a little hopeless.
The mood is bleak but wry. The short lines and dry comparisons give the despair a deadpan, almost darkly funny tone, as if the speaker is too tired to be dramatic.