Two people agree to meet at everywhere, which is a pleasingly impossible address: a place so large that no one could be found in it. From the first line, smolgeir's "everyone and everybody" builds its world from words that point at nobody in particular. The speakers call themselves "everybody" and "everyone," and the effect is double. The poem never says what they are to each other, but the pairing feels intimate, a private "I" and "you." At the same time, they could be anyone, as if this closeness were a common human condition rather than a single story.
The journey they plan does not end in arrival. They will "travel till we hit / nowhere," and the verb matters. People reach destinations, but they hit walls. Nowhere is treated as something solid, an obstacle at the end of the road. The poet also leaves "nowhere" alone on its own line, so the white space around it does the work of emptiness. "Everywhere" and "nowhere" share the same ending sound, so the two opposites almost rhyme. The distance between them sounds very short, as though they were one place seen from two sides.
The middle of the poem turns inward. "We breathe in darkness / it fills the spirit." Breath is ordinarily the sign of life, and the word "spirit" itself comes from the Latin for breath. Here what gets inhaled is darkness. The tone is calm, with no cry of distress. "Fills" sounds almost like nourishment, and that is what makes the line unsettling. The darkness is not an intruder. It is simply the air the two of them share.
Then comes the poem's one flat statement: "there is such thing as / an innocent lie." The missing "a" and the unpunctuated "its" a few lines later, along with the lowercase throughout, give the poem the feel of something said aloud or typed quickly rather than polished. Whether or not that was deliberate, it suits a voice that sounds half-confessing. "Innocent" and "lie" do not sit comfortably together, and the poem lets them rub against each other rather than settling the question.
The last two lines explain why. The lie is "a substance to make the soul / run dry." Calling it a substance suggests something swallowed or inhaled, like the darkness before it. The "its" could point to the lie or to the darkness, and the ambiguity seems useful because both are taken in. Judging by the language, the lies in question are the small, kind untruths people tell to get by. They feel harmless and even generous, but they drain something over time.
The central idea lives in the clash between "fills" and "run dry." Fullness and emptiness are not opposites here. To be filled with the wrong thing is its own kind of emptiness. The poem suggests that shared darkness and shared untruths can feel like closeness while hollowing out the people who share them. The opening promise of "everywhere" then looks like a kind of evasion, since a meeting place that is nowhere in particular is one where nothing true has to be said.
The construction is spare. This is free verse with no fixed meter, but many lines settle near five syllables ("we breathe in darkness," "it fills the spirit," "an innocent lie"), giving a loose pulse that fits the breathing imagery. The penultimate line stretches to eight syllables, as if drawing a long breath, and then "run dry" drops to two. Rhyme barely appears until the end, where "lie" and "dry" finally chime. The poem's first real rhyme arrives at the last moment and closes it with a click. The title, set in guillemets, reads like a quoted phrase, a bit of overheard speech that the poem then unpacks.
What makes the poem worth reading is its economy. In eleven short lines it sketches a relationship, a journey, a mood and a moral paradox without naming a single concrete place or person. Its vocabulary of "everyone," "everywhere" and "nowhere" is almost embarrassingly plain, yet the words are arranged so that each cancels or deepens the one before it. A reader finishes with a question the poem does not answer: if a lie can be innocent and still leave the soul dry, what exactly are the two speakers pouring into each other?