Walking through a city it finds ugly, the speaker of wordsforghosts's "The thoughts that follow…" falls into a familiar trap: a mind that suffers because it thinks, and can only escape that suffering by thinking more. The poem acts out the trap and follows it to a small, strange consolation, a tree whose roots, we are told, are really in the sky.
The opening is dense with abstraction. The city has an "unfeeling surface," but the numbness seems to belong to the speaker, who then calls their own mood "sophistry," a clever-sounding argument that misleads. The sadness is "without origin," so there is nothing concrete to fight. Then comes the oddest phrase in the poem, "visceral abstraction," in which a gut reaction and an idea fuse. The "nausea of a simple creature" follows, and the sentence loops back on itself: the creature wants "to know why it knows it / must suffer." The repeated "know" and "knows" has the circular feel of a thought chasing its own tail.
The wish that follows is for escape: "Wouldn't it be better / not to think at all, / to be." The line break leaves "to be" alone on its line, and the white space around it makes the wish for innocence feel uncomfortably close to a wish for not-being. That reading is an inference, but the poem's layout invites it.
Then comes the turn. An ellipsis and a lower-case "…but" start the speaker arguing against themselves. Meaning is "one of thought's / many children," a small act of personification that makes the logic almost familial. Without the parent there would be no child, and so "no concept / of meaning to be lost." The poem is honest about how shaky this is, calling it "a clumsy succession of steps." The argument tightens into aphorism ("no affirmation without negation") and then twists into paradox: "nothing is something, & something / is nothing / without opposition." The wording is deliberately slippery, as if meaning could only be grasped by holding opposites together. Even so, the speaker's reward is only a "fleeting / consolation," "my one broken prize."
This is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre. The poem's music comes from its page layout. Lines step across the page, so "ugly city" and "the sophistry" sit pushed to the right, and thoughts seem to pause and restart. The ampersands and ellipses keep it informal, like a mind talking to itself rather than a finished speech. The title is itself an unfinished phrase, and the poem completes it: "from the thoughts that follow / the hollow feeling." The title names the thing the speaker most wants to escape.
The closing image is where the poem changes register. After so many abstract nouns (concept, affirmation, negation, opposition), the last stanzas offer concrete things: tree, light, gravity, earth. The consolation is "a thought / that isn't mine," and the asterisk after "sky" seems to point to a note or attribution that isn't reproduced here. The tree reverses common sense. Light "falling continually from above" supplies "the energy / needed / to defy gravity," while the tree sends "roots / deep into / the earth." The tree is shaped by opposites, a pull downward and a lift upward, and it grows by using both. That gives a picture of the poem's argument: suffering and salvation come from the same source, and the heaviness that threatens the speaker is the force the tree must push against in order to grow. The verb "finding" (its way upwards) also suggests groping rather than certainty, much like the "clumsy" steps earlier.
The poem is worth reading because it doesn't pretend to solve despair. It lets a tired, over-thinking mind argue itself to a small foothold and then hands the last word to an image.