Seven businessmen, seven thoughts: the arithmetic is the first joke. Each man gets exactly one idea, and the matching numbers make them interchangeable, a row of identical coins. The verb "rattle" sharpens the insult. Things that rattle are hollow or dry, like dice in a cup or loose change, and the businessmen's talk sounds the same. Within two lines the poem has set up a world where some people have plenty to say and nothing in it.
The title, "Unequal access", leaves open what is being rationed. The poem seems to answer in layers. The second stanza is its most puzzling moment: "death giving them / what they please". The grammar lets death be a host or waiter who serves whatever is asked for, or a force so indifferent that it simply indulges those who can afford to be indulged. I read it as the second, but the poem doesn't insist. What follows is oddly modest: "a piece of hot salt beef / some brown bread and brandy". Nobody is dining on caviar. The pleasures are plain, warm and physical, and that makes the inequality more striking. The privilege on offer is not extravagance but ordinary comfort, taken for granted. The consonants help: the heavy, chewy *b* sounds of "brown bread and brandy" make the meal feel substantial, and "salt beef" has the same blunt, satisfying weight.
Then the poem turns on one small word. "And we make little / but desire better." The "we" arrives without introduction, and it is set against the businessmen's "they". The two lines are balanced almost like scales, with "make" against "desire" and "little" against "better", and they nearly rhyme in sound. "Make little" can mean earn little, produce little, or think little of things, and the poem lets all of these hover. What "we" have is not food or money but wanting, and the poem treats that as a form of wealth, even if a painful one.
The ending shows how carefully the form has been shaped. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and every line is lowercase. The stanzas shrink as they go: two lines, two, three, two, then two stanzas of a single line each. "live only an hour" is almost entirely short, plain words, and it takes up one line. The poem itself runs out of room, as the life it describes does. Because there are no full stops and the lines have no stated subject, "live only an hour" and "carry fire into our graves" can be read two ways. They can describe what "we" do, or they can be commands, almost a creed. Either we are given only an hour, or we are being told to choose a short life of intensity over a long one of ease. The poem does not settle it, and the uncertainty is part of its force.
The last image is the one that rewards a second look. Fire has been quietly prepared for since the third stanza. The beef is "hot", and brandy, whose name comes from the Dutch for "burnt wine", is a drink with fire built into it. The businessmen consume heat in small, domestic doses, at a table. The "we" are given the real thing, desire as flame, and they carry it somewhere the businessmen's comforts cannot follow. The grave, normally the place where everything is cooled and levelled, becomes the place where the fire is brought. Death in the second stanza was an accommodating server, and by the end it is something that cannot put out what the speakers carry.
This is what makes the poem worth reading. In under forty words it sets a social contrast (men who talk and are served against people who want and go without) beside an older one, about how short life is. It resists easy bitterness. The businessmen are mocked, but the poem's attention ends up on the "we", who are poorer in everything except longing, and who treat that as something worth taking with them. Whether this is consolation or defiance is the question the poem leaves for its reader to decide.