Two in the morning is the hour when a mind refuses to switch off, and wordsforghosts begins there, with thoughts that "became starlings." The choice is exact. Starlings rarely fly alone. They move in great shifting clouds, and the second line, "dispersing, flying & reforming again," copies that motion, its participles piling up like a flock turning in the air. Sleepless thoughts behave the same way: they scatter, regroup and never settle. Even the slightly doubled phrase "2 a.m in the morning" seems to linger on the hour. But this flock is not free. It is "afraid a cage & the end of all freedom / lay hidden, patiently waiting." Giving the cage the patience of a predator makes the fear feel inevitable rather than passing. The poem never says what the cage is, whether sleep, despair or something final, and that openness lets readers bring their own.
The middle of the poem is relief. On "other nights" the starlings fly above "evergreen trees, winding paths & / fresh clean streams." The vocabulary is plain and almost childlike, and each detail promises permanence (evergreen), unhurried travel (winding) and purity (clean). Then the dream grows stranger. "Some nights the trees became / something they could never be," and the line break after "became" enacts the transformation. The poem quietly admits that this beauty is built from impossibilities. The water becomes "perfect mirrors / flowing towards an endless sea," a lovely paradox of reflection that moves. The "endless sea" is the exact opposite of the cage, limitless where the cage is enclosed, though its endlessness may also carry a faint hint of oblivion.
Then comes a single word alone on its line: "Now." It is the hinge of the poem, and everything the dream offered is reversed. Evergreen trees are "blackened," clean streams give way to "a burnt & barren ground," and flight becomes "motionless." The soft, flowing sounds of "fresh clean streams" are replaced by the clipped b's of "blackened," "burnt" and "barren," and "starved" and "starlings" are chained together by their sounds as well as their fate. Because the title is "Fatal dreams," it is tempting to read the collapse as a consequence. Judging by the text, the dreams may have promised too much, or the thoughts may have been living on them and now have nothing left to feed on. The poem lets both readings stand.
The ending is the most delicate part. The sentence that begins at "Now" runs without pause across the stanza break: "ground // where there is nothing so beautiful as you." This is the poem's first and only "you," and it is unexplained. It could be a consolation, that even here someone is more beautiful than anything, or a loss, that not even "you" remains. The last lines then shrink to "or birds flying through / the clearest / blue sky," each one shorter, like a fading breath. The poem ends on the one thing its starlings can no longer do, and "clearest" echoes the earlier "clean" and "perfect" as a superlative for something now only remembered.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre. Its long, rolling lines at the start gradually give way to short, broken ones, so the form thins out along with the hope. The lowercase openings, the ampersands and the sparse punctuation give it the feel of a note written in the dark rather than a polished statement.
What makes it worth reading is its economy. In under twenty lines, one metaphor carries a whole emotional arc from anxiety through fantasy to desolation, changing meaning each time it returns. It also refuses easy comfort. The sky stays out of reach, and the poem is honest enough to leave it there.