Two letters in guillemets, then twenty-odd words: «E.D.» gives the reader very little to work with. The initials can be read more than one way. They are a common abbreviation for erectile dysfunction, and the last stanza, with its pill and its ageing, fits that reading closely. They could also stand for a person, Emily Dickinson being the obvious candidate, but nothing in the text confirms that, so it is safest to read the poem as a medical joke that turns serious. On that reading its subject is a mind and a body that have stopped agreeing, and the mind's attempt to talk its way around the problem.
The opening line, "no me to my yes", looks like a sentence caught mid-spin. "No" and "yes" sit at opposite ends, and "me" and "my" in the middle suggest a self split into two voices. The judging by the rest of the poem, the body says no while the wanting self says yes. The grammar is deliberately awkward, as if the speaker cannot quite say who is refusing whom. The next line, "I thought learnedly", reaches for dignity. The adverb is pompous and slightly comic, the voice of someone retreating into books and abstraction when the body will not cooperate. The past tense gives the line a rueful, after-the-fact tone, as if he were reporting his own defensive manoeuvre.
The second stanza continues the formal pose. "Take time to think / whom I thank" sounds like advice, from a doctor perhaps, or from the speaker to himself. The pairing of "think" and "thank" works like a rhyme without being one: the consonants stay put and only the vowel shifts, a small change that carries the sense of nearly the same self with something slightly altered. The word "whom" keeps the fussy, educated register going, yet the line never says who is being thanked. Is it a partner, a pharmacist, or no one? The poem leaves the question hanging, and the gratitude reads as awkward and perhaps ironic. "Take time" also plants the poem's other subject, which is time itself.
Then the learned voice collapses. "oh pill" is two syllables, a mock-lyric "O" that addresses a tablet the way a poet might address a muse or a god. The final line is the longest in the poem and the heaviest: "the cold red beef ages me". Four of its seven syllables, "cold", "red" and "beef" among them, land like blows. "Beef" turns the body into butcher's meat. "Red" suggests blood, while "cold" says it isn't flowing, so the colour of life sits beside the temperature of a shop counter. The verb is blunt too: "ages me". Ageing is done to him by the flesh itself. The line also echoes the poem's opening, since "me" ends the last line just as it began the first, and the speaker who started out refused ends up aged.
The poem has no regular rhyme or metre, but its shape is clear. The lines run roughly five, five, four, three, two and seven syllables, shrinking through the first two stanzas and then bursting out at the end. The poem seems to run out of ways to talk around its subject. There is no punctuation and no capital letters, so the thoughts tumble forward without the pause the speaker prescribes. That is a quiet irony: the poem tells us to "take time" and then moves in a few breaths.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does in such a small space. It treats an embarrassing subject with wit, first dressing it in scholarly language and then letting the language fail. The title adds a final puzzle, leaving the reader to decide which meaning the initials carry, or whether both are meant. Whichever reading you choose, the poem's central point holds: the mind can reason, thank and philosophise, but it cannot argue with a body that has made up its own mind.