Four times the speaker begins "it was like," and four times the comparison fails to hold. That is the engine of "hopelessly...". A person is trying to describe a feeling too large for any one image, so the poem keeps starting over. The title, with its trailing ellipsis, reads like the first word of a sentence that never gets finished. Hopelessly what? The poem never says. The one plain statement of feeling comes near the end, "all i could do was / want / want / want", and even there the wanting has no object. A reader might hear unrequited love, and the text allows that, but it fits any longing for something just out of reach. The real subject is wanting itself, stripped of its cause.
The first image is about sight: "seeing things through blurred glass." The single-word lines that follow, "shapes / faces / edges", name things we expect to see sharply, and the next line takes them back: "all undefined." Glass is also a barrier, and the poem says so in "all things i could not touch." The speaker can see but cannot reach, so closeness and distance arrive together.
The next images turn that frustration into physical sensation. "Surrounded by water yet feeling so infuriatingly dry" is the poem's longest-breathed line, and "infuriatingly" is its longest word. It slows the line down and adds anger to the sadness, which is a nice surprise in a poem so quiet. Then comes falling, which is the poem's dominant motion. The speaker jumps into a chasm, stumbles down streets, and later tumbles and is dragged down. What makes the fall painful is what's missing: "no cushioning grass to land on." The streets are hard, built and "empty," so the loneliness is human-sized as well as cosmic.
The dream image holds the poem's central contradiction. It is "filled with all the stars and moons of the cosmos / yet the blankness of an empty canvas all at once." The plural "moons" stretches past the real sky into pure abundance, while the canvas is potential with nothing on it yet. Joining them with "all at once" refuses to let fullness and emptiness take turns. This is what longing feels like when everything seems possible and nothing is in hand.
The form copies that feeling. There is no rhyme, no punctuation, and everything is lowercase, even the pronoun "i", which makes the speaker look small on the page. With no full stops the poem never gets a place to rest, so the line breaks do all the pacing. The comparisons sprawl across long lines, then the language shrinks to single words. "Want" is stacked three times down the page, like a pulse or like steps on a staircase going down. The break after "all i could do was" leaves the reader hanging in the same gap as the speaker.
The ending twists the falling motif. The speaker "sat there on a tumbling fragment of time", sitting still and tumbling at once, so the passivity feels as strong as the motion. "Fragment" suggests a moment broken off from the flow of time. Then the last line reverses direction: the speaker is "dragged reluctantly down as everything soared upwards." Because "everything" else rises, the fall may be only relative, a matter of being left behind. "Reluctantly" suggests the speaker did not choose this. The poem ends with no full stop and no consolation, and the sentence from the title stays open.
The poem is worth studying because it shows how precisely a feeling can be conveyed without naming its cause. Its method is contradiction: water and dryness, stars and blankness, sinking and soaring. Each pairing makes the same point from a new angle, and a student looking for how a poem can be built from failed comparisons will find a clear example here.