Seven short lines, and a whole working day is folded into a box. The poem opens with a flat declaration, "noon is a black box", and the strangeness lies in the metaphor. Noon is the hour when the sun stands highest and the day is brightest, yet here it gets the darkest, most opaque container imaginable. The poem never names the box, but the next lines point toward a screen: it is "the same box my face / is often in." Judging by the imagery, we might picture a video-call window with the camera off, a profile picture, or any frame in which a person presents himself to others. Either way, the hour and the face end up in the same rectangle.
"Black box" carries several echoes, and the poem lets them all hover. It is what engineers call any device whose insides can't be inspected. It is also the common name for a flight recorder, which logs what happened, and for the plain dark rooms where theatre is staged. Each sense fits. Midday has become something you can't see into, a recording of an uneventful day, a small stage with no set.
The title, "Influencer", sharpens the irony. The word promises reach, followers and an audience. What the poem delivers is one tired person at midday. The title can also be read the other way: the box is the true influencer, deciding where the speaker's face goes and how his day is shaped. The word works in both directions, and that double pressure is where much of the poem's quiet comedy comes from.
The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter, but its sound is carefully managed. The first two lines run to five syllables each, giving a steady, boxy beat. The third line drops to four and breaks off at "is often in", so the preposition dangles at the line's end. The grammar itself is left inside something. Almost every word in the poem is a single syllable ("noon," "black," "box," "face," "sing"), with only "weary," "often," "sitting" and "laughing" stretching beyond that. The plainness makes the poem sound like a muttered observation rather than a performance, which suits a speaker who is only performing for a screen.
The finest sound effect comes at the end. "Noon," the poem's first word, is almost indistinguishable aloud from "no one," its last phrase. The poem finishes where it began, and the bright hour and the absent audience turn out to be nearly the same sound. Another echo works more quietly: "sitting" and "sing" share their opening letter and vowel, as if the song were what is left when the heaviness of sitting is shaved away. "I sing" is the shortest line, only two syllables, and it is the one moment where the speaker does something instead of being placed somewhere. Everything before it is about containment ("box," "in," "sitting"). The singing is a small bodily refusal, a way of using the lungs when the rest of the body has been parked.
Then comes the oddest phrase, "a laughing no one." Grammar lets "no one" do something only a person can: laugh. The reader has to choose. Perhaps the speaker imagines an audience laughing at him, which would be humiliation. Perhaps it laughs along with him, which would be delight. Perhaps the laughter is his own, and "no one" is the listener he invents to keep himself company. The poem refuses to settle it, so the tone hovers between embarrassment, loneliness and play. The laugh is also the only sign of a response anywhere in the poem, and it comes from nobody.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It captures a very recent kind of isolation, in which being seen and being addressed are no longer the same thing. A face can sit in a box all day without anyone answering it. Yet the poem declines to be a complaint. The speaker's weariness is physical and ordinary, and his answer is cheerful and slightly absurd: he sings anyway, even if the only audience is a laughing no one.