"Will" stands alone on the opening line, and much of the poem grows out of that one word. It means willpower ("a will to live"), but it is also the word that makes the future tense, as in "the things I say, said, and will say" and "tomorrow i will breath." Dillman's speaker starts with a bold claim: wanting to live and wanting to die "both take courage," and for a long time the speaker had neither. Fear pressed from both sides. Life was feared "almost as much" as death, and that small "almost" is an honest, slightly chilling piece of bookkeeping.
The middle of the poem is about exhaustion, and its images are mechanical. Days are "a march," hour after hour. The speaker keeps "hoping, / searching / for a charge, / for a spark," like a soldier waiting for orders or a battery waiting to be recharged. The short, stacked lines feel like steps taken without energy. Then comes "my loaded corpse," the most unsettling phrase in the poem. The body is loaded with "a million tomorrows," but "corpse" says it feels already dead, and "loaded" may carry an uneasy hint of danger. The body "sifts" through "the same activities," as if living were a matter of filtering grit. "Muscle memory" gets a line to itself, because the speaker is surviving on habit alone. Even "Until breathing was a chore" sits by itself, a flat sentence with no punctuation to soften it.
The word "tomorrow" does the poem's real work. In the middle it is something to fear: the speaker hangs on "to dread the same tomorrow as i did yesterday," and time collapses into one repeating day. By the end, the word has turned over. "There's always promise of tomorrow" opens the last stanza, and "promise" is repeated like a small chant: of air in the lungs, of "a connection / To people / The earth i wander on / And myself." That list moves from others to the world to the self, which is the order in which the speaker's isolation seems to be undone. The last line, "the promise of tomorrow / Keeps me in today," is a neat paradox. The future, once the source of dread, now anchors the present. Breath changes in the same way, from a "chore" to "all my prior breaths" and a counted chain stretching across days.
The poem is in free verse, with no regular rhythm or rhyme, which suits a mind that is "thunderous" and unsettled. The one clear rhyme cluster arrives at the darkest moment: "dread," "dead," "head." The people in the speaker's life "keep me here," yet the poem claims they "instill dread," and that this very dread has kept the speaker alive. It never explains what the dread is. One possible reading, though it is only an inference, is a fear of what the speaker's absence would do to them. The questions that follow ("Was it them / Or was it me"), spaced out with white gaps, refuse a tidy answer. The suggestion that it might be "my own overactive thoughts" or just "a song" is modest and believable.
One small detail is worth noticing. The speaker's "i" is mostly lowercase in the early stanzas, while capital "I" appears in the final stretch ("I now only fear death," "I no longer dread living"), with one lapse in between. Whether deliberate or not, the effect is of a self gaining a little height.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to oversell recovery. There is no rescue and no single cause, only breath, other people, and perhaps a song. The ending is more declarative than the hesitant middle, and some readers may find it a touch neat. But the hope it offers is small enough to trust, and the plain language makes a hard subject easy to approach. The poem treats staying alive, one ordinary day at a time, as an act of courage, and it is the same courage the first lines described.