Most of the drama in "Lights Out" happens inside two heads, and the quiet tragedy is that neither can get into the other. The speaker watches someone whose body seems to be coming apart ("shaking hands and / Shattering teeth") while that person wonders what the watcher is thinking. The answer is both tender and painful: the speaker is "Contemplating / Words I can use to get through to you." Care is present, but only as thought. We never hear a single sentence the speaker actually says, and that absence is the poem's central idea: the distance between wanting to help and managing to.
The physical details are chosen with care. Teeth usually chatter, from cold or fear, but here they are "shattering," a word that belongs to glass. Whether this was deliberate or a slip of the ear, it works, because the person being watched seems brittle and close to breaking. The sh- sounds of "shaking" and "Shattering" give the opening a hiss and rattle, almost the sound of the tremor itself. We are given only hands and teeth, with no face, no room and no cause. Cold, panic, grief and exhaustion are all possible, and by naming none of them the poem lets each reader supply whichever feels most true.
The form suits this uncertainty. There is no rhyme and no steady rhythm, and the sentence tumbles across line breaks, hanging on small words at the end of each line: "and," "what," "am." Those weak endings leave the reader slightly off balance, as if the syntax were trembling too. Then comes "Contemplating," alone on its own line. It is the longest word in the poem and the only one given a line to itself, so it slows everything down like a held breath. There is a quiet irony in it, because the word for thinking sits exactly where an action should be. "Get through to you" works in two ways as well. It can mean to break through someone's silence, or to help them survive an ordeal. Either way, the speaker is still only preparing.
The ending changes the poem's angle. The grammar of "you wonder what / I am thinking... / And lie down and think to yourself" makes the "you" the subject again, so the final lines move from the speaker's watching eyes into the other person's mind. The tense changes too, from the present of "I look" to the past of "The lights went out." The line is then repeated, first as a statement and then like an echo, or like someone saying it again to make it real. Because there is no closing punctuation, the poem simply stops, as if the light has cut it off. The title, "Lights Out," adds to the ambiguity. It is the bedtime command, a power cut, and the phrase for being knocked unconscious. The lights could be sleep, or the end of hope, or something worse. The poem does not choose, though the past tense hints that whatever the speaker was composing did not arrive in time, or was never spoken.
It is also possible to read the poem itself as those contemplated words, an attempt made on the page because it could not be made aloud. That reading makes the poem's smallness a strength. In just a few lines, Tiffany catches something most readers will recognise: standing beside someone in distress, rehearsing sentences and then finding that the moment has gone. The poem explains nothing and offers no comfort. It trusts the reader to feel the weight of the unsaid, and it leaves them in the dark with it.