Somebody in Thomas W. Morris's "Loose Wires" is desperate to be heard and, in the same breath, desperate not to be a bother. The speaker describes themselves as a malfunctioning machine, with glitching software, a low battery and files vanishing one by one, and then closes by telling the listener not to worry. That tension is the heart of the poem: the gap between what a person feels and what they allow themselves to say. Technical language becomes a shield, a way of describing pain without quite admitting it is pain.
The opening stanza sets up the speaker's isolation with a neat piece of logic. They want "someone not human," because "humans are just versions of me, / wired differently." If everyone else is only a variation on the speaker, nobody can offer a genuinely outside view, and being surrounded by people is no cure for loneliness. Even this complaint is phrased in machine vocabulary, so the speaker already sees the world through circuitry before the metaphor is formally introduced.
The second stanza begins with a line that stumbles: "I am not sick doctor." The missing comma makes it read like a rushed denial, the first of several brush-offs. Then comes the sharpest moment: "I would restart, / but then a life I am ditching." A computer can restart and lose nothing that matters, but a person cannot, and the word "ditching" shows what the speaker thinks a restart would cost. Here the metaphor breaks down, and judging by the wording, what leaks through is how heavy things feel. The speaker moves on at once, to a low battery and a sour joke: "My species is disgusting, / launch us into space." Notice the slip from "I" to "us." The speaker wants to flee humanity but cannot exclude themselves from it.
The form is plain but effective. Five quatrains are followed by a closing three-line stanza. After a loosely echoing first stanza ("me" and "differently"), the rhyme settles onto lines two and four: glitching/ditching, place/space, made/fade, delete/incomplete. The rhymes are blunt and sometimes almost bouncy, which gives the bleak content an awkwardly cheerful chime, like someone keeping their voice bright. The lines are short and the rhythm uneven, with no steady beat, so the poem sounds more like nervous speech than song. Punctuation thins out as well. "Oh look an update" has no commas, and the flat, sarcastic delivery does their work: hope arrives and is dismissed in the same breath.
The fourth and fifth stanzas track a slow loss of control. The speaker "chip[s] away at the code," a phrase that suggests patient, tiring effort, perhaps the labour of trying to fix oneself. Yet the update is "too late," and the screen fades. Then "the files highlight and delete." Highlighting and deleting are things a user does on purpose, so the speaker seems to be both the damaged machine and the hand on the keyboard. "Memories are blocked, / but loading is incomplete" leaves everything stuck mid-buffer, neither gone nor available.
Then comes "Anyway," alone on its line, like a window being closed. The last stanza is the lightest in the poem: "don't worry about me, / just a few loose wires you see." That "me" rhymes with "see" and echoes the "me" in the first stanza, so the poem ends where it began, with the speaker unchanged and still unheard. "Just a few" shrinks everything that came before into a minor inconvenience, and the title turns into a shrug.
What makes the poem worth reading is how recognisable that shrug is. Many people answer a worried question with a joke or a "don't worry," and Morris captures the move in the vocabulary of screens, updates and batteries that most of us use daily. Not every line is polished, and some word order is bent to fit the rhyme, but the roughness suits a speaker who is barely holding the sentences together. The poem asks its reader to do exactly what the final stanza forbids: to worry, and to look closer.