Hair that refuses to behave is the whole subject here, yet the poem ends up somewhere stranger and warmer than a joke about a bad hair day. Its central idea is that teasing can be a way of paying attention. The speaker begins with a shrug, calling the hair "kind of silly", and finishes by comparing it to marble. Between those two verdicts, something shifts. The thing that seemed ridiculous turns out to be worth looking at closely.
The first stanza is built from blunt, bristling sounds. "Thick" and "stick" rhyme, and with "locks" they pile up hard *k* endings, so the words themselves seem to stand on end. "Up and out" gives the hair a direction, but not a tidy one. It doesn't fall or lie flat, it spreads and sticks out. Then comes the fragment "Kind of silly," set on its own line like an aside muttered across a room. It has no subject and no verb, which makes it sound spoken rather than written. The hedge "kind of" matters too. The speaker doesn't call the hair simply silly, only partly so. Judging by the tone, that small softening already hints at affection, and it suggests the speaker is someone close enough to tease.
The title is worth a second look. "Locks" most obviously means strands of hair, but the word also means the things that keep doors shut. The poem never says so, but the second stanza gives that reading some support. It brings in a wall, and a wall with cracks, which are places where a closed surface has given way. The speaker's fingers move through the hair the way something moves through a gap. This may be a coincidence of vocabulary, but it adds a faint sense of closeness, of getting past an outer layer.
The second stanza is a single long sentence, and its length is a change of pace after the clipped opening. Its key word is "running", which appears twice. First the fingers are running through the hair, then the marble is "running through cracks in the wall". The verb passes from the gesture to the image, so the motion of the hand becomes the substance of the comparison. Notice also the shift from "locks" to "it". The hair was plural and spiky, a collection of separate strands, but once touched it becomes one flowing thing.
The marble is the poem's strangest choice, and it can be read in more than one way. Most likely it means the veined stone, where pale lines thread through a darker body. Perhaps, when fingers part thick brown hair, lighter streaks or gaps appear and look like those veins. That is an inference from the image, since the poem doesn't explain itself. The comparison sets hard against soft. Marble is cold, polished and permanent, while hair is warm, tousled and temporary. It also sets the grand against the humble, because the marble runs through a crack in an ordinary wall. A crack is a flaw, yet here the flaw is where the beauty shows. The same reversal applies to the hair, whose messiness is what makes the image possible.
Notice what the poem leaves out. It never uses a word like "love" or "beautiful", and it never goes back to take "silly" back. The feeling is carried entirely by the comparison, which is more convincing than a declaration would be. The speaker's first judgment is simply overtaken by what the speaker sees. The poem has almost no rhyme beyond "thick" and "stick", and its line lengths are uneven, two short statements followed by a long, unwinding one. That looseness suits its subject, because a neat, rhymed poem about unruly hair would feel false.
What makes this small poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. In a handful of lines it shows how an everyday detail can change under close attention, and how affection often hides behind a joke. It also shows how an unexpected comparison can say more than a direct statement. The poem asks us to look twice at something we might have waved away, and that is a lesson that reaches well beyond hair.