Inside every head, the poem suggests, there is an orchard nobody planted on purpose. It begins "behind the eyes, / where multitudes abide," a crowded interior, and admits at once that the owner of this mind is not in charge: it "decides to obey strange instructions." The phrase is a small paradox. The mind both gives the orders and follows them, without being able to read them. Everything after that records what happens when thinking runs on its own.
The central image is thoughts as fruit. They "bloom like fruit & fall, one / by one," and the line break does the dropping for us, so that "one" hangs at the line's end before "by one" lands underneath. Then the poem forks. "Some" sits alone, pushed far to the right, as if the page itself were sorting thoughts into two fates. Some "return to the earth & become new life," while others, "for reasons unknown," decay slowly into "nothing but waste." Those three words matter. No rule separates fertile thoughts from rotten ones, and the sorting seems arbitrary. The speaker watches it happen without being able to intervene.
The third movement darkens the scene. The orchard becomes a "dark forest floor," and the fallen thoughts are "warped": "their shape & sound contort." It is striking that thoughts have sound as well as shape, because that hints at the gap between what is thought and what is said. Then they "grow thorns." Fruit that sprouts thorns is unnatural, and I read it as thoughts turned defensive, painful to anyone who reaches for them, the thinker included.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no fixed meter or stanza pattern. Lines scatter across the page with deep indents and gaps, so the white space works like the silence between falling objects. Ampersands replace "and" throughout, giving a quick, notebook-like feel and keeping the clauses tumbling forward. Rhyme is almost absent, which makes the one true pair stand out: "will beauty persist / when feelings no longer exist?" The chime is almost too neat, a small song in the middle of the mess, and it asks whether beauty can outlast the feeling that produced it. The decaying fruit around it hints at a fearful answer.
After that the poem turns outward: "If I say you have misunderstood me / will you say you know what I mean?" It is a trap with no exit. Any correction the speaker offers can be absorbed by the listener's confidence that they already understand. The "you" is never named, so it could be a friend, a lover or a reader. The problem has now moved from private to shared. Thoughts rotting in the dark is one difficulty, and getting them across to another mind is a second.
The ending is the most exposed moment: "& why write a poem // no one will read?" The question is stranded on its own, set apart by a gap and an indent, yet the ampersand makes it feel like the next link in the chain. The doubt grows naturally out of everything before it. There is an irony too, because the question is asked inside a poem that is, at that moment, being read. Whether that answers the doubt or only proves the previous stanza's point, that reading is not understanding, is left open. The writer's chosen name, wordsforghosts, seems to fit this mood, though that is only an inference from the name. It suggests words offered to an audience that may not be there.
The poem is worth studying because it doesn't try to resolve its worries. It moves from biology to aesthetics to communication and finally to the act of writing, so that the poem ends up examining its own reason for existing. Its form carries the meaning too: the line breaks make the fall, the white space makes the silence, and the lone rhyme makes the hope. It shows that a poem can be unsure of itself and still persuade, and that the most honest ending may be a question.