The poem speaks directly to "you" and pictures a person's past as a procession of skeletal marionettes. Every decision and memory trails behind them like a puppet on strings, bones dangling and loose. The word choices, "ragged," "decaying," "maudlin," "shambolic," make this parade feel sad and untidy rather than grand. The speaker seems to look at a life as something worn down by its own history, with the person unable to cut free from what they carry.
The ending changes shape. The lines shrink and scatter across the page, and the poem slows to a crawl: "weak blue / deep blue / hollow / fallow / moment / after / moment." Blue suggests sadness, "hollow" and "fallow" suggest emptiness and barren ground, and the repeated "moment" makes time feel like a dull drip. The mood is bleak, weary and a little numb, as if the speaker sees life as a dance that goes on whether or not anything grows from it.