Nine short lines and one epigraph are enough for wordsforghosts to sketch the end of something without ever saying what ended. The epigraph, set apart in guillemets, reads like a line overheard from the middle of a confession: "I used to sit smoking on the windowsill of your bedroom window, not knowing anything…" The clumsy doubling of windowsill and window sounds like speech rather than polish, and the ellipses at both ends suggest a thought that began before the poem and carries on after it. The central idea sits in those last two words, "not knowing anything." The poem is about the distance between that earlier ignorance and the present, where knowing has become a kind of injury.
The first stanza is built from fragments. "Dying little deaths in & out of bed" borrows an old phrase for intimacy, but the participle "dying" never reaches a main verb, so the action seems to go on without arriving anywhere. The ampersand makes the line look hurried and casual, and "in & out" has a back-and-forth motion that suits the subject, though it could also hint at someone drifting in and out of the relationship. "Hollowed-out heads" nearly rhymes with "bed," but the click of the match is slightly off, as though the sound can't quite close. Then comes "rapid-shallow breath," with no verb and no article. The line is short and clipped, and it makes the reader's own breathing quicken and thin out. Closeness is described entirely through the body, and the heads are empty.
In the second stanza the poem moves to the window and the cigarette. "Cigarette sparks illuminate the dark" sounds almost hopeful until the sentence loses its footing. The next line ends on "another," and the sparks are left "drifting away" across the line break, so the syntax drifts in the way the sparks do. Then the verdict arrives: "insignificant, unnoticed display." The words are cold and slightly bureaucratic, and their negative prefixes pile up. A light that brightens the dark yet isn't seen is a good image for the speaker, who sat at the window while someone else, presumably, did not look. The sparks also quietly answer the "little deaths" of stanza one, since each is a small burst that ends in ash.
Only in the last stanza does proper end rhyme appear: "away" and "day." That chime brings no comfort. It makes the sentence feel settled, like a verdict. The tense has also shifted. The epigraph and the first two stanzas live in a present of dying and drifting, but now "this became just another day," a flat past-tense summary. The word "another" returns for the second time, followed by "one more," and the repetition turns even heartbreak into routine. The last line, "one more entry wound into my brain," is the sharpest in the poem. An entry wound is the mark where something enters and does not leave, which contrasts neatly with "in & out" in the first stanza. "Entry" can also suggest a line in a diary or ledger, one more item logged. Either way, the damage is mental, and it lands in the same head that was "hollowed-out" earlier, so the emptied space now holds something that hurts.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It could have shouted about betrayal or loss, but it keeps its language small: a cigarette, a breath, an ordinary day. The pain comes from that smallness, from the sense that nobody noticed and the speaker is still counting. The name wordsforghosts suggests words addressed to someone who is no longer there, and the poem does speak to an absent "you" who is never described. The poem works through compression, with a bare form that mimics numbness while the imagery slides from sex to smoke to violence. Its last image leaves the reader to decide how deep the wound goes.