Brian Routh's speaker begins as something battered and buried, an "ancient relic" lost in jars and tossed about by tide and dust storm, who somehow reassembles and sets off across an empty town. The wandering feels aimless, but there is a hope running through it: the speaker looks for a shroud in its splendour, a new dawn, bright primroses.
Then the mood swells. The speaker's head and heart feel overblown, and the world becomes a noisy, swirling mess of abstractions and "twisted" crowds. Even so, the speaker wants to stay and keep watching, feeling the pulse in the head and the heart pumping "oil" through an aging body, a phrase that makes the body sound like a machine.
The ending turns wry. Tomorrow is described like a bank account, and the past is a record that's "no longer in the top fifty." The speaker seems to greet the future with curious, slightly mocking cheer. The overall mood is restless and dizzy, but stubbornly eager to go on living.