Eight short lines, and a whole relationship has gone from warm to barren. The poem is about the aftermath of a loss, though it never says what kind. A "wonderful, soulful, home" has become a ruin, and the speaker admits to having a hand in it: "My brain became the eraser / of the equation." Nothing is known here about who wrote the poem or when, so the reading rests on the words alone, and they are enough.
The opening metaphor is the strangest and most interesting. An equation is something balanced, with two sides that are supposed to be equal. Calling the past an equation suggests a life or a love that once added up. The brain, usually the keeper of memory, turns into an eraser, a tool for wiping out. The line can be read in several ways. The speaker may be deliberately forgetting, or numbing the pain, or the mind may be failing to hold on to what mattered. The final image of beer glasses hints at drink, and drink is one way a mind erases things, but that is an inference, and the poem leaves it open. What the metaphor does make clear is that the destruction is internal. The speaker is not describing a storm that struck from outside.
The small word "Prickly." sits between the title and the poem in guillemets, which make it look like a label or a remark someone has made. It is a tactile word, and it reaches the reader before any explanation does. It might describe a person, the mood of the relationship, or the feeling of remembering. Its sharpness stands against "wonderful" and "soulful," and the poem lives in the distance between those two moods. The spaced-out title, "M A D I," works in a similar way. Letters pulled apart like that can look like a name being spoken slowly, or carved, or already coming to pieces. Whatever the title refers to, the typography prepares us for fragmentation.
The poem has no regular rhythm and no steady rhyme, and the form suits the subject. The first lines are clipped and almost clinical, with that mathematical "eraser" and "equation." Then the syntax starts to stretch. "The remnants of what was, / Once a wonderful, soulful, / home..." trails off into an ellipsis, and the sentence only finishes after a stanza break: "Is now a desert." The grammar itself seems to have a hole in it, and the white space plays the part of the missing home. The stumbling commas in "wonderful, soulful, / home" also read like someone searching for the right word and then losing it.
The imagery moves from dry to dry-and-broken. "Desert" gives us emptiness, heat and thirst. "A wasteland" goes further, because a wasteland suggests land that was once useful and has been ruined. Then the last line adds the human debris: "tattered memories and shattered beer glasses." Here the poem finally produces a rhyme, or near-rhyme, in "tattered" and "shattered." After seven lines without any musical pattern, the chime lands almost cruelly, like the sound of something falling apart. The two adjectives also pull in different directions. "Tattered" belongs to cloth, so the memories are worn and frayed, something once soft that has been used up. "Shattered" belongs to glass, which breaks suddenly and can still cut. The memories are the quieter damage and the glasses the violent one, and the sharp edges connect back to "Prickly."
There is an irony in the final picture too. Beer glasses in a desert are empty, and they are the leftovers of a party or a long night. They belong to a social, lively scene, which sets them against the soulful home the poem began by mourning. The landscape is no longer a place where anyone lives. It is a place where things have been left behind.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it uses to get this far. It does not explain the loss or assign blame, and it does not ask for pity. It trusts three or four precise images and a bent sentence to carry the feeling. The speaker's confession in the opening line, that the mind was the eraser, gives the poem its sting: the emptiness is partly self-made, and the speaker is left standing in it, looking at the glass.