"Consequence" is built as one long, winding sentence that doesn't stop until it has said something uncomfortable. The urge to escape our own mistakes rests on a fantasy: that whatever we leave behind will "somehow change / or else disappear completely" while we are away. The colon after "return" works like a door being opened. What lies behind it is not what we hoped for.
The opening word choices set up the poem's logic. "Consummation" usually belongs to marriages and ambitions, the moment something is brought to completion. Here it is applied to "sorrow & regret," "impulse & blind intent," so these unhappy things are treated as if they had finally been fulfilled, and the attempt to escape follows from them. Because consummation leads naturally to birth, the poem's closing image feels prepared rather than sudden. The "hideous birth / of conjoined twins" is the delayed result of what was done in the first stanza, and that is what the title means. A consequence here is not an abstract punishment but something that grows, is delivered, and has to be looked at.
The ampersand does quiet work throughout. The poem uses "&" every time it joins two things: "sorrow & regret," "impulse & blind intent," "bad-faith held / to itself & nothing else," "loved, / & are as beautiful." Each pairing is visibly stitched together, which makes the words themselves a little like the twins they lead toward. The poem never says what the twins stand for. Judging by the pairs it keeps building, they may be the doubled feelings and motives it began with, but the text leaves this open.
The sound of the second stanza suits its subject. "Susurration" is a word that whispers, and it is full of soft s sounds that carry on through "excuses" and, later, "us." The phrase "gentle susurration / of bad-faith" is a small paradox. Self-deception, the poem suggests, doesn't shout. It murmurs reasonably, which is why it works so well. Yet the bad faith is "held / to itself & nothing else," a closed circle with no outside to support it, and the excuses are "running too thin," like cloth worn through or a liquid spread over too wide a surface. The line break after "held" makes the phrase briefly hang, as if the bad faith were being clutched.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre, but the poem is not without music. "Intent" and "attempt" echo each other, "consummation" and "susurration" share a heavy ending, and "thin" faintly rhymes with "twins." Most of the rhythm comes from the page itself. "To escape" is indented, as though stepping away. "Return:" is pushed far to the right, so the reader has to travel to reach it. The word "the" sits alone before "gentle susurration," a small hesitation before the quiet falls. Such spacing makes us feel the delay between leaving and coming back, and the dread in that delay.
The ending turns on its last six lines. Up to this point the language has been abstract and accusing: "mistake," "bad-faith," "excuses." Then the twins arrive, and the poem softens. They "want only to be loved," a plain, almost childlike phrase that is hard to resist. The paradox that follows, "as beautiful / as they are ugly," refuses to let the consequence be simply monstrous or simply sweet. The final phrase, "just like us," is set far across the page and lands almost as an aside. It moves the poem from a judgment about one act to a statement about all of us. Our mistakes aren't foreign to us. They are our own offspring, and they look like their parents.
That turn is what makes the poem worth reading. It would have been easy to end with a warning that running away doesn't work. Instead, the poem admits that what waits for us is ugly and also deserves tenderness, and that the same is true of the people who made it. It doesn't offer forgiveness or a lesson. It offers recognition, and in a poem this short that is a generous and unsettling place to stop.