Everything about "& again…" suggests it began before we arrived. The title opens with an ampersand, as if we've walked into the middle of a list, and closes on an ellipsis, as if the sentence won't finish. That sets up the poem's subject, which is a cycle. Someone is returning to a familiar emotional place ("Old familiar sights, the smell of the night") and knows exactly what comes next. The poem never says what the feeling is or where it came from. Grief, anxiety, addiction and nostalgia would all fit the evidence, and the vagueness seems deliberate. What the poem insists on is that the feeling outlasts every attempt to escape or describe it. Images can be used up, but what lies beneath them can't.
The opening couplet works through sound before meaning. "Sights," "night" and "right" (three lines later) share a long *i*, like a refrain half-remembered from a song. Then the body takes over: "A cut to the back of the throat, / stops the heart beating right." The sense moves from smell to physical pain, and "right" does double duty, since the heart isn't only beating wrongly but failing to keep proper rhythm. The next instruction, "Breathe it in deep / & close your eyes," makes the speaker a kind of stage manager preparing for a ritual they have performed many times.
What they're preparing for is a "promenade of bullshit cavalcades." The phrase is the poem's most startling moment because its registers collide. "Promenade" and "cavalcades" are stately words for public display, strolling and parading, and "bullshit" drops a brick through them. The speaker is both spectator and critic, drawn to the show and contemptuous of it. Judging by the language, the parade may be a procession of familiar thoughts, excuses or memories that arrive on schedule whether wanted or not. The phrase "about to begin again" makes the speaker sound resigned rather than surprised.
Then the poem widens: "As the world still turns, / as the Sun still burns." The repeated "as" and the rhyme are almost nursery-like, and that is the point. The universe goes on with its easy rhythms while the speaker's own heart can't. These are the only rhymed lines besides the opening, so the poem's brief moments of music are tied to things that are indifferent or familiar. Right after them the poem switches to "you," and the line "you search" is pushed across the page. Throughout, the indentation makes lines hesitate or step sideways, as though the poem is catching its breath. The second person also does two jobs at once, since the speaker addresses themselves and pulls the reader into the same loop.
The turning point is the admission that the search is for "another way to escape, / another way of saying the same thing / again…" Escaping and saying are treated as the same act, so writing itself is one of the escape routes, and the poem concedes that it is *another way of saying the same thing*. It criticises itself as it goes. The next line begins with its own ellipsis, "…but the images are all gone," picking up the earlier one across the stanza break like a held breath. The poem's construction then proves its claim. It began with concrete sensations (sights, a smell, a cut), and now those are stripped away, leaving the abstract, bare word "feeling."
The last stanza personifies that feeling as "the relentless bastard," in the same blunt voice as "bullshit." The final verb, "purged," carries the weight of the poem's argument. It suggests cleansing, the old idea that putting emotion into words drains it away. The poem denies this. It ends on the hard *d* of "purged" and a full stop, with no rhyme to soften it and no ellipsis left open.
The poem is rough and unpolished, but that is part of its strength. Most poems promise release, and this one honestly reports that release hasn't come, and in doing so says something true about how feeling survives after memory fades. The name it appears under, wordsforghosts, seems to fit that idea, since a ghost is what remains when the images are gone. That is an inference, but the poem leaves the haunting unresolved.