Most poems about tourists look down on them from a safe distance. Here the speaker joins the crowd in the first breath and stays there. The American visitors in Amsterdam have "mouths filled with slogans, heads full of commercials, / hearts overflowing with Hollywood," and the sentence seems to promise satire. Then comes the swerve: "including me." The speaker is one of the people being mocked, and the rest of the poem is an attempt to work out what that means.
The opening list is built to deflate. Mouth, head and heart are the organs of speech, thought and feeling, and each is stuffed with something manufactured. The verb "prowl" turns the tourists into animals hunting through the Red Light district. The line break is playful too, since the district's name is split across two lines ("the Red / Light") as if the sentence had stopped at a signal. The title is worth a glance as well. In Dutch, *dampkring* means "atmosphere," and judging by the title it is also the name of an Amsterdam coffeeshop. Either way, the poem is set in a place whose business is altered states, and its thinking drifts in that direction.
That drift shows in the form. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only long, prose-like lines that spill over their endings. The enjambment is constant and often awkward: "looking for something / else," "this within / is formed entirely from without." The sentences keep running past the line, so the thought seems to be finding itself as it goes. The speaker moves between two registers. One is abstract and aphoristic: "The truest answer transcends our ability to formulate / its question." "Everything's an illusion except for / the way illusions work." The other is blunt and conversational. The aphorisms sound profound, but they also sound a little like slogans, and the poem may know it. A speaker who has just mocked heads full of commercials is now producing neat, quotable lines of his own.
The central image is the bucket. "My bucket of a self" is deliberately unglamorous, a hardware-store object, yet the speaker immediately stretches it to "near-infinite volume, able to hold / the sun, the moon, the stars." The comedy comes from that gap between humble container and cosmic contents. It also carries the poem's argument. A bucket has no content of its own and holds whatever is poured in. This is how the speaker reverses his earlier belief that "the answer would come from within": "within / is formed entirely from without." The self is a vessel, and what fills it is Hollywood, advertising and everything else the speaker has taken in. That puts him in the same position as the tourists he began by teasing.
The poem's most effective passage is the run of short sentences that follows: "All my experiences. All my guts. All my bullshit. All my / selves." The repeated "All" builds like an inventory, and the vocabulary slides from the dignified ("experiences") to the bodily ("guts") to the crude ("bullshit"). That slide is a kind of honesty, because the speaker refuses to separate his deep self from his junk. Then "selves," plural, splits the identity apart, and the next two sentences answer the "All" with "None": "None of which are mine. None of which are / enough." The first "None" says the contents aren't owned. The second says that even if they were, they wouldn't satisfy.
The ending is where the poem lands its joke and its ache together. "I'm missing something. Something I must / have overlooked." The repeated "something" sounds like someone patting their pockets for keys. Then the verbal tic "Like," drops into the last line and the voice becomes casual, almost shrugging: "maybe everything." The vague "something" swells into "everything" without any change of tone. That is the poem's final turn on the idea of an answer that "transcends our ability to formulate its question." The speaker started out "looking for something else," and he ends by suspecting that what he lacks is the whole picture, not one missing piece.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it won't let its speaker off the hook. It avoids both smug cultural criticism and a tidy spiritual discovery. It says that a self assembled from outside influences can still feel an emptiness, and that the feeling is real even if the self is borrowed. It says this in the same chatty, borrowed language it is worried about, and that makes the doubt feel earned.