Escape is the poem's big temptation, and it quickly shows why escape doesn't work. The speaker describes people who run from their sorrow and regret, believing the things they leave behind will either change or vanish by the time they come back. They won't. What waits for them is a quiet, almost whispering kind of dishonesty, a bad faith that only talks to itself, with excuses wearing thin.
The final image is the strangest. The consequence of our choices is pictured as the birth of conjoined twins, something "hideous" yet wanting only to be loved. The twins are "as beautiful / as they are ugly," and then comes the twist: "just like us." The speaker seems to be moving from judgment toward tenderness, suggesting we are made of tangled impulses and regrets that can't be pulled apart.
The mood is sombre and reflective, but not cold. The scattered spacing on the page feels like hesitation, and the ending offers a hard kind of compassion.