Brian Routh's poem begins by looking outward at a world that seems exhausting and empty: "endless games," egos and vanities, and a desperate human need to make things last, to "fix" permanence in time and space. The tone is tired and a little bitter, as if the speaker has watched all this long enough to see through it.
Then the poem turns sharply inward. The "hands around my throat from the inside" are a startling image of being choked by something that is part of you, not an outside attacker. The speaker feels invaded and loses their sense of self: "I am no longer myself."
The final stanza doesn't resolve the fear so much as widen it. The speaker becomes "everything good and bad," solid and fluid, actual and imagined. It can read as surrender or as a strange acceptance, a self too large and contradictory to be held in one shape. The mood is tense, unsettled, and oddly open at the end.