On the last night before the world ends, the speaker can't focus on the catastrophe itself. Instead, she hears a drill, a repeating "click on, whirr, off" lodged in a small cell of her mind. It's the sound of a mind clinging to something mechanical and steady while everything else falls apart. Around her, life carries on in odd, muted ways: her sister talks as if the end won't come, though she knows otherwise, and everyone quietly packs belongings into fabric suitcases, a flimsy kind of protection.
The speaker seems numb, overwhelmed, and maybe a little helpless. The title "Building" sits strangely against all this destruction, and the poem hints at a need to make or do something, anything. In the end she picks up a drill herself. Then the lines shrink: "clicked it on" repeats, then "clicked it," then just "click." The sound fades out, and the poem leaves us in an unsettling, anticlimactic silence.