"I am, just what I told you / and not." The poem opens with a statement of identity that cancels itself before the sentence ends. The title, "Inconsistent, see," works as a warning and an invitation at once: here is the evidence, look for yourself. Francis Scudellari's short poem is about a feeling that has gone missing and a heaviness that has moved in to replace it. It makes its case by behaving the way it describes, hesitating, doubling back and refusing to settle.
The central puzzle is the missing "Sympathy." The capital letter turns an everyday word into something like a lodger, or a pet that has wandered off: "Where did it go, / the Sympathy?" The poem never says whose sympathy this is, and the ambiguity is useful. It might be the speaker's own capacity to feel for someone, or the sympathy that others offered and then withdrew. Either way, the reply is flat and carefully hedged: "It's not mine, / or not now." The small correction "or not now" is the most honest moment in the poem. It isn't a grand declaration of numbness, just a refusal to claim more certainty than the speaker has.
Against that uncertainty, the weight is given the plainest statement in the poem: "The / weight is." No description, no object. The verb stands alone, as though the heaviness were the only thing the speaker can say with confidence. Compare the opening "I am," which immediately had to be qualified. The self wavers, but the weight simply is.
The sharpest piece of wordplay follows: "The weight came / fast. Faster than the wait / left, or tried to." To the ear, "weight" and "wait" are the same word, so the line slides between two readings. A burden arrives more quickly than the state of waiting can clear out, and the waiting, that braced, suspended feeling of expecting something, lingers in the doorway while the heaviness walks in. The identical sound suggests that heaviness and suspense may be the same condition. The line breaks add to the effect. Breaking after "The" makes the speaker stumble, as if gathering strength for the next word, and "Not all / at once" spreads the arrival of the weight over the lines, so the reader feels it accumulate.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem is free verse in short, uneven lines, and its rhythm comes from fragments and full stops that land in awkward places. Sound does the binding that rhyme might otherwise do. A thread of w-sounds runs through it: "went," "Where," "weight," "wait," "wanting." Loss, burden, delay and desire are quietly linked by the way they are pronounced, as if they were one feeling approached from four directions.
The only extended image arrives late. "It hopped in / and out like the sparrows" is deliberately vague about what "it" is, and that vagueness lets the weight, the sympathy and the speaker's moods all fit under the pronoun. The sparrows "visit, interchangeably, / inconsistently." The long adverbs stretch the lines and seem to hop themselves, and "inconsistently" calls back the title. "Interchangeably" is an unsettling choice, since it suggests that one visitor is as good as another and none of them stays. Then comes the lovely, melancholy phrase "wanting / but not daring." It could describe sympathy approaching the speaker, or the speaker approaching other people. In either case, closeness is desired and then abandoned.
The final word, "gone," answers the earlier "Where it went" without telling us where. The poem ends on a retreat, not a resolution.
The poem matters because it resists two easy options: dramatising a low mood or tidying it into a lesson. It gives no cause and no cure, only a small, ordinary image from a garden or windowsill. It is also consistent in its method. A poem about inconsistency that hedges, interrupts itself and ends on something vanishing is performing its subject, and the reader is left, like the speaker, watching an empty space where something briefly landed.