Before the poem shows us a room, it hands down a diagnosis: "time is a symptom of being." The sentence is built like a medical fact. A symptom isn't the illness itself but the sign that something underlying is going on. Here the underlying condition is simply existing, and time, with its ticking and ageing and endings, is how that condition shows itself. The idea is bleak if you read it as a complaint, but the next line complicates it: "and I am all in on it."
"All in" is the language of card games, where a player pushes every chip into the middle of the table. Applied to time, it makes the speaker sound cheerfully reckless, a gambler who has staked everything on the one game nobody can leave. There is also a quiet logic in it. If time comes with being, the only way to refuse it is to refuse being, so the speaker commits. The phrase turns what might have been a lament into a shrug, even a kind of enthusiasm.
Then the poem drops from the abstract to the everyday. "At the table as / a gentle sort of scholar" breaks its line on the small word "as," so the sentence hangs for a moment before the self-portrait arrives. That portrait is hedged and a little teasing. The speaker is not a scholar but "a gentle sort of" one, as if the title were being tried on and found slightly too large. The verbs that follow are just as modest. "I poke at my dinner" suggests someone more absorbed in thought than in food, pushing things around the plate. No punctuation or conjunction separates poking from reading, so the two actions run together into one idle, distracted evening.
The reading matter is the "Epistle of Cassandra." Judging by the name alone, the poem is drawing on Cassandra of Greek myth, the prophet whose warnings were never believed. I can't say which text the poem has in mind, but the name carries its own weight. A letter from someone who sees what is coming and cannot be heard is a fitting thing to read after announcing that time belongs to being. It also quietly mirrors the speaker's situation. Everyone has been warned that time passes, and everyone goes on eating dinner. The comedy and the dread sit side by side, and the poem never chooses between them.
The construction supports this tone. The poem has no capital letters and no punctuation at all, not even a final full stop. There is no rhyme, and the three couplets read like thoughts set down in a notebook. The line lengths are uneven but telling. They run from eight syllables to seven, then shrink to five on "at the table as," and finally stretch to nine on the last line, "read the Epistle of Cassandra." The poem ends on its longest line, as if the speaker's attention is wandering off into the text. The sound work is subtle too. "Table," "gentle," and "Epistle" all end in the same soft "-le," a faint chime across the domestic scene, while "being" in the first line echoes in the title "Unending." Because there is no full stop, the poem fits that title. It stops without ever really concluding.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It states a large philosophical claim in its first six words and then refuses to dramatize it. There is no storm, no deathbed, only a person at a table with a plate and a book. The poem suggests that this is where such ideas actually live: in ordinary evenings, handled lightly, with the mind drifting while the food goes cold. It leaves the reader to decide whether the speaker's calm is wisdom, resignation, or a small private joke, and it is probably a bit of all three.