A scream is about the least ambiguous noise a person can make, yet "Isolation" opens by suggesting that nobody could read one correctly. "If I started to scream, / would you believe it came / from both pleasure & pain" – the speaker hasn't screamed yet, and the whole thought hangs in the conditional "if". The poem is already about a gap between what is felt inside and what another person can hear. The ampersand, a quick shorthand where "and" might have sat, fuses pleasure and pain into one sensation. The unnamed "you" is asked to accept a feeling that contradicts itself.
Then the poem swerves. "can you believe / in anything / at all?" The word "believe" returns, but its reach has grown enormously, from trusting one person's account of one scream to faith in anything whatsoever. The lines are stranded across the page, "in anything" pushed to the right, so the question seems to lose its footing as it falls. Personal doubt becomes existential doubt within a single line break. Who "you" is never settles. It could be a lover, a reader, even God. Not knowing who, if anyone, is on the receiving end is part of the loneliness.
The next move is a retreat. "But that question came to me in a dream / so ignore it." The verb "came" echoes the scream that "came" from pleasure and pain, and in both cases something arrives from outside the speaker's control. "Dream" also rhymes with "scream," the only true rhyme in a poem that otherwise refuses patterns. It quietly links the two acts. Both happen alone, in the dark, with no one to check them. The speaker withdraws the most serious question by demoting it to a dream, a defensive shrug. The colon after "ignore it" promises an explanation, but what follows is only another retraction: "because / this isn't poetry."
That line is the poem's central trick. A poem announces it is not a poem, and does so in carefully broken lines, with white space doing the work that meter would normally do. It is free verse with no regular rhythm, and the pauses are the music. The stutter of "because" and the gap after it make hesitation audible. Self-dismissal works like armour here. If the speaker says "ignore it" and "this isn't poetry," the words can't be judged or rejected, because they were never offered seriously. The poem protects itself while giving itself away.
The ending lands on a surprising word: "just another useless eulogy for // isolation." "Just another" implies a habit, a speaker who has written this kind of thing before. A eulogy is a speech for the dead, and the word comes from Greek roots meaning "good words," so calling it "useless" turns an act of honouring into an admission of failure. It is strange to mourn isolation, which is usually the thing we suffer from rather than lose. Perhaps the speaker is grieving a self that was once at least private. Perhaps the loss is the hope that anyone will answer. The name attached to the poem, wordsforghosts, seems to chime with this idea of words offered to someone who cannot reply, though that is an inference from the name, not a fact about its origin.
The final word sits alone on its own line after a gap, which is the best joke and the saddest detail in the poem. The form acts out the meaning, since "isolation" is isolated on the page. It is also the title, so the poem loops back to where it started with no exit. And "isolation." is followed by the poem's only full stop, a hard closing of the door.
The poem is significant because it shows how people hide sincerity behind dismissal, and how a poem can undercut itself and still move us. Its claim to be "not poetry" is exactly what makes it read as one, because the effort to take back its feeling shows how much feeling there was. The reader is also pulled into the role of "you." Our attention is the only answer the poem can get to its question, and that is a small, quiet defeat of the isolation it describes.