The opening line has no question mark, and that sets the tone. "How will these exposures turn out" is asked, but not in the expectation of an answer. "Exposures" does a lot of work. It is a photographer's word, for frames waiting to be developed, but it also means standing unprotected in weather or in public. Judging by the imagery of wind finding "haven in banners", "used nylon" and raised voices, the poem seems to place us among people gathered outdoors, perhaps at a protest, though it never says so. What it cares about is what it costs those people to keep turning up for each other.
The first sentence stacks contradictions: "sumptuous penury", "rich / in despite". Poverty is described in the vocabulary of luxury, and "despite" is turned from a preposition into something you can own. Even the scars are "luxuriant" and "imagistic", as though wounds were also pictures, the developed prints of those exposures. The tone is wry, not self-pitying. People with little have made a currency out of defiance and hurt.
Then the poem turns inward. The speaker has been "peeling off / layers and sticking others on", which makes identity a matter of costume changes, and asks "what sort of glue is words." The answer, "clag", is a deflating word. It suggests the thick paste of school art lessons, and its sound sticks in the mouth. This glue "smacked and wiped me till / i acquiesced in a person". Becoming a person is presented as something you give in to under discipline, like a child being scrubbed clean. The figure who "whiled their time squatting / on a desk, siphoning emptiness / into their womb to take the edge off" is hard to pin down. It could be the self that was made or someone else. The image is of a body filling itself with absence to dull pain, and it is the poem's bleakest picture of what being formed by language and authority can leave behind.
The wind is a small, strange comfort. It "penetrates used nylon / to be closer to us", an affectionate intruder, and it "scuttles a copse", with the hissing s and k sounds doing the scuttling. Against this, the poem sets the voices of instruction: "get on with it, go on / with your work, abide the ferment." The banners, we are told, say little "apart from colour and debilitation." "Ferment" holds two meanings at once, unrest and the slow brewing of something in the dark that must be waited out.
The final movement is the most tender. "Bruised friends" arrive to be "held up by their / wizened wrists, their necks slack / and green". The friends slide into wilting stems, people as cut flowers. You wipe them down and scold them "in a put-on voice", a mock-stern performance that is itself a kindness, "to remind them what they are": "a faintest threat of persistence / squirming on the head of a pin, / still about to be eaten." The pin recalls the old puzzle about angels dancing on one, but this creature is small, wriggling and prey. Survival is called a "threat", and mere persistence becomes a form of defiance. Then comes a stray comma at the start of a line, ", and the process continues." It reads like a missing word, a gap that enacts the grind of carrying on, with the sentence picking up mid-breath.
Formally, the poem is one unbroken stanza of lowercase free verse with no end rhyme. Its rhythm is irregular and walking-paced ("i have been walking"), with lines breaking mid-phrase ("till / i acquiesced"), so that the syntax keeps tipping forward. The last two lines drop into a casual register, with "its" missing its apostrophe, as if the speaker has stopped performing. "its been swell playing these cards / warmed by your fingers" gives us a hand of cards dealt and shared, warm from someone else's grip. After all that talk of words as glue, what remains is touch.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It refuses both heroics and despair. Solidarity here is small physical work: wiping down, scolding, holding up. Language is treated with suspicion, as something that sticks and smacks, yet the poem ends in thanks.