Few poems about loneliness open with a joke, but "Temptation of the Moon" comes close. "You grow enthusiastically depressed over being loveless" pairs two words that ought to cancel each other out. The clash is the point: the voice mocks its own wallowing even as it admits the wallowing is real. The "you" is odd too. Nobody is named, so it sounds like the speaker lecturing themselves, until the next line slips into "my skin" and then "I'm", and the gap between the two voices closes.
What follows is a mood built from colour and light. Moonlight "kissing my skin under the purple skies" gives the speaker the only affection on offer, a touch from something that cannot touch back. Then the palette shifts: "My vision faded from red to an igneous blue." Igneous is a geologist's word for rock born from fire, so the blue is cold on the surface but fiery in its origins. That suits someone whose feelings run hot while everything looks frozen. The name attached to the poem, Jack Frost, brings winter with it, and the blue sits comfortably beside it, though that is only a suggestion. The next line, "An indefinite color with such a hue", is plain and slightly circular, since a colour is already a hue. Even so, it enacts the speaker's difficulty in naming the feeling. It also gives the poem its one clean rhyme, blue and hue, a neat chime around something that refuses to be pinned down. "Then the lights flickered later" doubles the time words, so the line stutters like the lights it describes.
The turn comes with "I'm desperate to get some / Love from a character". The break after "some" is cheeky. The slangy phrase hangs for a moment with a cruder meaning before "Love" arrives and softens it. There are no metaphors here, only a flat admission of need. "Character" is the key word. It suggests a figure in a story, so the speaker is looking to fiction for what real life hasn't supplied. Notice that "later" and "character" end in nearly the same sound, a faint echo that pulls the reader toward this confession.
From there the poem stops moving across the page and starts to fall down it. Counting roughly by syllables, the lines shrink from five to four to three, then to two, and finally to single words: "For / Me." The shape acts out the sentence it carries. The admirer has "Fallen", and the word sits near the bottom of the page, where the eye has also dropped. The line breaks also leave small words stranded at the ends of lines ("in the", "The Moon my"), so the syntax hangs in mid-air, hesitant, as if the speaker is scared to finish. Hidden inside the narrowing column is the title itself, "Temptation of / The Moon", which makes the moon's pull and the pull of the fantasy the same thing. The last word, "Me", stands alone at the bottom as the point the whole poem has been tapering toward.
What gives the ending its odd power is that the speaker knows better. The admirer "doesn't even / Exist", and the poem says so openly. Then it closes on a sentence of pure good news, "Has just / Fallen / For / Me", phrased like a bulletin about a real event. The poem lets both things be true. The speaker can see the invention for what it is and still take comfort from it. Whether that reads as consoling or heartbreaking is left to the reader, and the opening joke about being "enthusiastically depressed" hints it may be both.
That honesty is what makes the poem worth reading. It mixes casual, modern speech ("get some") with lyrical images of purple skies and moonlight, and it does not ask for pity. Its voice is loose and a little rough in places, but the form does real work. It is a good example for students of how line breaks and shape can carry feeling that the words only hint at, here the slow collapse of a lonely mind into a story it knows is false but cannot quite put down.