Everything you have ever decided or remembered, the poem says, trails behind you like a procession of broken puppets. In a few lines it turns a whole life into a funeral march that is also a circus act. The central idea is that a life is mostly the accumulated weight of its past, hauled along moment after moment, and that this weight is less solemn than sad and slightly absurd.
The poem opens with a verb, "Dragging," and the effort is already in it. Decisions and memories are lumped together as one load, joined by a casual ampersand rather than the formal word "and." The colon that follows promises an explanation, and what arrives is an image: "a ragged procession / of skeletal marionettes." The choice of puppet is clever. A marionette is something controlled, moved by strings it cannot see or cut. Yet these figures are *behind* you, so you seem to be the one pulling them. The poem never settles who holds the strings. Are our memories the puppets we control, or are we the puppet they jerk about? "Myriad strings," indented so that the phrase hangs from the line above, suggests there are too many to count or untangle.
The diction is physical and unpleasant. "Skeletal" and "decaying bones" make the puppets corpses, and "hanging limp" drains them of any life a dance might need. Even so, "they dance." That contradiction drives the poem, because the dead past keeps moving and keeps performing. Two adjectives describe the performance: "maudlin, shambolic." Maudlin means tearfully, self-indulgently sad, and shambolic means chaotic and badly organised. Both words are slightly mocking, and the sneer seems aimed at the "you" who owns the parade. The rhythm helps. The long, trailing lines of the opening stretch out like the procession itself, and the repeated *m* sounds in "marionettes," "maudlin" and "moment" give the poem a low hum.
The final stanza is where the poem changes. The colon after "existence" leads us to expect a verdict, and the poem answers with colour and then with silence. "The weak blue / deep blue" is a small, painful escalation. Blue is the colour of sadness, and it moves from faint to profound within two lines. Then comes the poem's only true rhyme, "hollow / fallow." Until now the poem has been free verse with no pattern, so when two words finally chime they feel like a hollow bell. Both words are about emptiness, but they differ. "Hollow" is empty with nothing to come, while "fallow" describes a field left unplanted, which implies it could be sown again. It is the poem's one faint hint that the emptiness might not be permanent, though that is an inference and the poem does not press it.
Last, the layout does the work of the meaning. The stanza narrows to single words: "moment / after / moment." The line breaks force us to wait between each word, so we feel the moments drip past. "After" is a clever middle term, since it means both "following in time" and "pursuing," and the moments follow the speaker in the same way the marionettes do. There is also no full stop, so the sequence is left open, with no promise of an ending.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. The marionette is an old image for fate, but here it is made fresh by rot and by the uncertainty over who holds the strings. The form also acts out the theme: lines that drag, indents that dangle, and a final stanza that thins out like the days it describes. Even the name under which the poem appears, wordsforghosts, suits a piece about carrying the dead things of one's own life. The poem offers no consolation, only an exact and unsettling picture of what it feels like to be followed by your own past.