The poem begins mid-breath: "Seconds away from the breathing / That I've come to set my rhythm to." The definite article matters. It isn't "your breathing" or "a breath" but *the* breathing, as if the reader should already know whose it is. The speaker has tuned their own pulse to it the way a body falls into step with a metronome. That is closeness, but it is also dependence, and the whole poem follows what happens when the thing you've synchronised with turns out not to be what you believed.
The middle lines are the most intoxicated. "Drunken paradise and poetic reverie" is thick with soft, swaying sounds, and the two abstract nouns sound like the speaker's own romanticising. Then comes the sharpest image: "Burning holes in pockets, side winding bottle rockets." The old idiom about money burning a hole in a pocket is turned into something literal and dangerous, with fireworks stuffed in the clothes. "Pockets" and "rockets" chime inside the line, and the "side winding" path of a bottle rocket, which veers off unpredictably, suits a feeling that is exciting, reckless and impossible to aim. Nothing here can be saved for later.
What follows is the comedown, and the line breaks make it feel like one. "No one in the darkness / Just a pointed finger / And some apathy." The lines shrink and the colour drains. The pointed finger could be blame or just a gesture toward the exit, and the poem doesn't say which. The phrase "some apathy" is deadpan, since it treats numbness as a small leftover quantity, like "some milk" in the fridge. "Dripping nose no longer" hints at a physical symptom that has stopped, whether from crying or illness, though the text won't confirm which. Either way the relief is empty, because the next line insists "I am speeding just the same." Feeling has gone and momentum hasn't. "Home grown and lower tone / Then anyone, then anything" slides further down. The comparison seems to mean "than", but the spelling "then" makes it read like steps on a staircase, first anyone and then anything, each one lower.
The turn arrives with "I come to see you through the lights / Holding hands with dynamite." The "you" appears at last, blurred behind glare, and paired with an explosive that echoes the rockets earlier. Whether the danger belongs to the loved one, to the speaker, or to the two of them together is left open. Then comes "But in that picture," the pivot word "But" and the frame of a photograph or remembered scene. "It's not the image / That I've grown accustomed to." That phrase closely echoes line two. "Set my rhythm to" and "grown accustomed to" both end on a small, helpless "to", and both describe habit rather than choice.
The last two lines carry the central idea: "It's the ghost that haunts the memory / Of what I saw in you." The ghost isn't the person. It haunts a memory of *what I saw*, which puts the weight on the speaker's own act of seeing. What has died is a vision, the paradise and reverie from earlier. The poem begins with a living, rhythmic breath and ends with something that only haunts, so presence has turned into absence without anyone being said to leave. Apathy, the title word, then reads less like coldness than like what remains when an illusion has been lost.
Formally, the poem is one unbroken block with no punctuation, so lines spill into each other the way "speeding" suggests. Its rhymes arrive irregularly (pockets/rockets, grown/tone, and the near-rhyme lights/dynamite) and flash briefly like the fireworks it describes. After the ornate middle, the plain last lines land harder. The poem's interest lies in how precisely it captures an uncommon heartbreak, where the loss is less of a person than of the way you once saw them.