Calling yourself "a brief and passing thing" in a poem titled "Artifact of the Unknown Days" starts a quarrel before the first line is over. An artifact is what survives, and the speaker claims to be what vanishes. The whole poem lives inside that contradiction: a voice that insists on its own transience while leaving behind a record of exactly how fading feels.
The subject, as far as the text allows, is loss that has hardened into a way of living. "The piece of you I keep inside of me is tearing me apart" is the emotional centre. We never learn who "you" is or what happened, and the poem is stronger for it. What counts is the image of another person as something swallowed whole, now working against the body that holds it. The sound of the poem supports this. The first line has a near-regular beat of about four stresses, almost iambic, and then the second line sprawls into something closer to prose. The poem never returns to that regularity. There is no rhyme and no stanza pattern, and the lines lengthen and snap off with the speaker's breath. Once the opening composure is gone, nothing replaces it.
The imagery is built around helplessness. "A doll soaked in blood and trapped in shade" gives us an object made to be handled, unable to move itself. "Shade" also meant a ghost in older English, so the speaker may be half-dead as well as dark-bound, though that is an inference. The same passivity returns near the end: "Preparing to be shipped / Away by others." The line break lets "shipped" hang before the agents appear, and the decision belongs to someone else. The speaker has become a parcel, and a crated, carried-off object is exactly what an artifact is. The title and the imagery turn out to describe the same thing.
The middle of the poem is its turn. "Lugubrious nihilism" is a stiff, theatrical, Latinate phrase, almost a costume of despair. The next line deflates it with a shrug: "That's really all we can do at this twisted point." Then comes "But," and the poem tries to build something. The wings are made of "optimistic,nihilistic joys," and the missing space after the comma crams the two opposites so close they nearly fuse. "Epicurean skies" adds another layer. Epicureanism is associated with calm, modest pleasure and with the idea that death is nothing to fear, so the skies promise acceptance rather than rescue. But the gesture of reaching is grim: "We throw our hands from our bodies, into the air." Hands thrown off the body read as self-dismemberment disguised as aspiration. Then the dancing happens "around bleeding out," and joy and injury are never separated.
Time starts to shrink in the second half. "Now I lose weeks / And days" drops from a larger unit to a smaller one, and "And days" sits alone on its line like something left over. The setting is "a gunned thorn bush." The phrase is odd enough to resist one reading. Judging by the context, it suggests a place that has been shot at or made hostile, a shelter that hurts. The pronouns shift too: I, you, we, I, and finally a generalised "you." The closing lines step back from private pain to a kind of rule: "When you've been alone for long enough / The trees speak the dead language of others." A dead language is one nobody speaks any more, so the trees seem to be voicing people who are absent. Whether that is comfort or hallucination, the poem doesn't say. It ends on an image, not an answer.
That refusal to tidy up is what makes the poem worth reading. It doesn't claim that nihilism can be turned into hope. It shows someone trying to do exactly that, and lets us see both the effort and the bleeding. For students, it is a useful example of how emotion can be carried by form: a rhythm that collapses after its first line, contradictory words forced into one phrase, and a speaker who gradually passes from "I" to something like a warning to anyone who might be next.