The title is a contradiction, and the poem lives inside it. A "present absence" is something that is there precisely by not being there, and that is how the poem pictures a deep depressive low: less a feeling than a hole with weight. Signed only with the name wordsforghosts, it comes without a biography attached, and it doesn't need one. What it gives us is a speaker caught in a cycle of despair, violence against the self, and brief, unreliable recovery. Its central idea is bleakly honest: the only light left at the end is the dim glow of what has already gone.
There is no rhyme and no steady rhythm. The shape on the page does the work instead. Words are stranded across wide indents, so that "thin thoughts" and "collapse" seem to hang in empty space. The opening sentence is deliberately hard to hold together: thin thoughts are "convinced that words / can poison internal organs" and then, with no connecting word, "collapse / into a pool of stagnant water." The grammar gives way at the same moment as the mind it describes. Ampersands replace "and" throughout, making the voice sound hurried and scrawled. The ellipsis after "existed…" lets the line trail off, like the faint trace it describes. Late in the poem the lines shorten to "Then wake up / alone / without hope," and the poem slows almost to a stop.
The imagery keeps turning the abstract into something physical and unpleasant. Thought becomes poison, the mind a pool "where no light survives," and days "fold & fall away" like cloth. The zombie "convulsing on the floor / in a room / with an unlockable door" is the poem's most striking picture of being stuck. The door isn't locked, which would imply a key somewhere. It is *unlockable*, so no escape was ever planned. The "Will" gets a capital letter, as if it were a character, and is torn between "hatred / of daylight & fear of the night." Neither half of the day is safe. Notice, too, that the poem never says "I." The speaker is absent from their own poem, which suits its subject.
Then comes the tapeworms passage, the harshest in the poem. Whether the parasites are a hallucination or a metaphor for intrusive thoughts, the text leaves open. The only command in the poem arrives here: "rip them out, one by one." Afterwards the arms are "wet ribbons of red," and the flesh is "tattered remains… / draped across bone." The language is clothing and decoration (ribbons, tatters, draping), which makes the violence look strangely like fabric. It echoes the earlier "fold & fall" and gives the horror an uncomfortable, almost fragile beauty. The imagery suggests self-harm, so this is a poem to read with care, but it never glamorises what it shows.
The ending refuses a happy turn. The hope is that "this will end the way it always does," and what always happens is routine: "new meds, new promises." Putting medication and promises side by side, both "new" and both likely to wear out, quietly admits how many times this has happened. Only here does the poem say "your," pulling the reader into the fall. Memories "always break your fall," and "break" can mean both to cushion and to shatter. The last image, "the pale shimmer / of phosphorescent ghosts," is exact. Phosphorescent materials give off light they absorbed earlier, slowly and faintly. That is memory in the poem: not warmth, but stored light fading in the dark. The final word, "ghosts," also echoes the name the poem is signed with.
The poem matters because it doesn't console. Many poems about suffering move toward recovery or insight. This one shows illness as a loop, and it finds a small, ambiguous mercy in the loop's final image rather than a cure. For a student reader, it is a good example of how line breaks, white space, and a single well-chosen word like "unlockable" or "phosphorescent" can carry an experience that plain description would flatten.