Nothing accompanies "Every Us" except the name wordsforghosts, so the poem has to carry everything itself. It does so with a quiet, painful honesty. The speaker mourns someone who is gone, and what hurts most is less the absence than a late recognition: while the loved one was present, the speaker was not really looking.
The poem begins in the body. "The weight against / my left arm" is a small, exact detail, the pressure of someone sleeping beside you, and it brings "the calm." But the first stanza ends by admitting that words "can never reach / across the distance between us." That is a bleak thing for a poem to say about its own medium, and the line stretches across the page as if trying to cross that distance. A few lines later the weight has vanished, and the poem marks the change with a colon: "the weight no longer against my left arm:". Colons recur at moments of turning, after "between us," after "no longer against my left arm," and after "I realised I was blind." Each one works like a held breath before a hard truth.
Rhyme plays no part here, and there is no steady metre. The rhythm comes from fragmentation and repetition. In the second stanza the lines shrink to a few syllables: "return, / return to me, / don't / leave, don't / leave / only empties." The line breaks allow a double reading. "Don't leave" is a plea, but "leave / only empties" also says what the departed one has done, left only emptiness. The ampersands add to the sense of someone typing or speaking in a rush, with one thought tumbling into the next. Even the phrase "masochistic anarchy" suggests a relationship that was chaotic and self-wounding, and it sits beside "romantic naivety," the speaker's own verdict on their younger, blinder self.
The third section is one long, unbroken sentence, a question that unspools through bed sheets, "butterfly wing / flickering eyelids unfurling." The imagery is delicate and sensory: "human heat," "the scent and sense of you." The speaker remembers waking with someone, the "purity of attention / beyond / the iris reflection." That last phrase becomes important later. To look into someone's eye and see only your own reflection is to fail to see them at all, and the poem turns on exactly this failure: "You saw me & didn't look away: / I thought I saw you." The speaker admits to having been "blind," seeing "only what I wanted to," and owing "the true love you were long overdue." The language of debt is stark, because it can no longer be paid.
The cause of the loss is never stated. "The day you / finally found tranquillity" could suggest a death, and "I will never hold you / again" and "still-born memories" sound final, but the poem doesn't confirm it. The ambiguity helps. The reader is given the grief without the circumstances and so feels it more directly.
The ending changes the poem's direction. The speaker carries "your name tattooed into my skin," a permanent mark that contrasts with the vanished weight on the arm. Then comes the plain statement "I continue," with its grammar delayed until after all the grieving clauses that precede it. What the speaker continues "for" is "every me & every you," which explains the title: the many versions of two people across time, including the blind version and the one who finally sees.
The last word, "us," answers the first stanza. At the start, "us" named a distance that words couldn't cross, and at the end it names "that short time when nothing else existed / but us." The distance has not closed, but the word has, at least in memory, been made whole.
This is what gives the poem its force. It doesn't turn loss into consolation or make the speaker blameless. Grief and guilt are held together, and the only comfort it offers is that remembering clearly, even too late, is a way of finally paying attention.