In Rayn Roberts's "Where to Begin," the furniture has a livelier emotional life than the person who lives among it. A turquoise chair "is married to a red desk," a white telephone "has divorced a black stand," and a computer is "running out to shop." The jokes are bleak ones. The room is full of relationships, and its one human has none. The speaker's summary is flat: "There is nothing but what days bring / They bring little for weeks."
Then the poem tips into the surreal. "One day, the visions ease / Into a pleasant unawareness." The word "visions" suggests that something strange has already been happening, though the poem never says what. Over morning tea, "Time unravels your head like a ball of twine," and the black and white floor tiles begin to lift and drift. They form a mosaic of the face: one holds "an eye socket and one eye," another "a nose pulsing," while "Your ears are wings flapping in another." The body comes apart "limb by limb, organ by organ" and hangs in the air as "A mobile of body parts / United yet distinctly alone." That last phrase is the emotional hinge. It describes a dismantled body, but it also describes a lonely person, connected to the world and separate from it at once.
The central idea seems to be that isolation, pushed far enough, loosens the self until the surroundings absorb it. The poem refuses to say whether this is a breakdown, a release or a death, and that openness is part of its power. What unsettles most is the tone. The disintegration is "pleasant," "without pain," "Fantastic, fascinating, hypnotic." The horror arrives like a lullaby. When "A window to the world opens," the one violent verb appears: "Everything sucked out into air into sky vanishes." It comes only when there is nobody left to feel it.
The construction supports this. The poem is a single unbroken block with no stanza breaks, which fits days that blur into one another. It has no rhyme and no regular metre, and its diction is plain and conversational. But the pace shifts. The opening is an inventory of short, deadpan statements, and the first lines already hint that the room is alive: "white walls breathe and bend," floor tiles "flex to feet." Once the tiles rise, the sentences stretch and pile up, and "Yet another and another" lets the grammar join the tiles as they join. Sound does quiet work too. The alliteration of "Fantastic, fascinating, hypnotic" and the repetition of "Limb by limb, organ by organ / Bone upon bone" give the passage the rhythm of a chant. The ellipses after "hypnotic" and "opens" feel like drifting off. The final vanishing line has no commas at all, so "air into sky" rushes out in one breath.
The colour scheme matters as well. The only vivid colours, turquoise and red, belong to objects. The person's body is converted into the monochrome of the floor, black and white like a chessboard, "Moving to a secret order, a song." The room has not just outlasted its occupant but made a pattern out of them. The second person "you" matters too. It pulls the reader into the chair, so that it is our head that unravels.
The ending turns back to the title. "There is no one now where the lights glow / And the TV runs day and night, no one / To say where to look; nor even where to begin." The lights and the screen carry on, but attention has gone, and a screen with nobody watching is only a source of light. "Where to begin" shifts meaning along the way. It starts as the ordinary hesitation of someone facing an empty day. It ends as a question no one is left to ask, and perhaps also a question about how anyone would reassemble a self scattered round a room.
The poem matters because it makes modern solitude strange and visible. The machines of connection, such as the phone, the computer and the television, keep running after the person has gone. By giving the objects marriages and errands and the human nothing, it suggests how thin a life can become while still looking furnished.