The title, «Confused...», announces the mood before a single line is read, and the poem then acts it out rather than describing it. There is not one statement in the whole text. Every line is a question, and none is answered. The subject is change: things coming and going, the new turning old, a target that shifts mid-journey. Underneath runs a more unsettling worry. If everything keeps moving, how can anything be called an ending, a goal, or a reason for living? The central idea is that purpose, endings and the meaning of life are so tangled together that when one slips, the others lose their footing.
The opening lines work like a puzzle with the pieces swapped. "What comes when something else goes?" is the simplest exchange imaginable, arrival and departure. The next line reverses it: "What's going on if something else is coming?" The idiom "going on" drifts from motion toward "happening," so the verbs lose their fixed meanings. Then comes the pair at the poem's most disorienting point: "What passed when something new happens?" and "What happens when something new passed?" The same words trade places, and past and present collide. "Something new passed" almost contradicts itself, since a new thing shouldn't have a past yet. The reader trying to parse the line feels the speaker's confusion at first hand, because the grammar has gone slippery too.
Halfway through, the vocabulary changes. The vague "something" gives way to a "target" and a "destination," and the poem borrows images from archery and travel. They are bare images, with no landscape and no scenery, only the idea of aiming and arriving. Everything now hangs on the word "end." "What ends when a target changes? / Will it change the end when the target ends?" Here "change" and "end" swap places, the same mirroring trick the first half played with verbs. The English word "end" also means both a finish and a purpose, and the poem exploits that double meaning. "Is a destination that has changed the end?" cannot be answered until you decide which sense is meant, and the poem refuses to say.
The last four lines stand together without a gap, and they tighten into a chain. Each question hands its final word to the next: "Is the end of a path to the target? / Is the target a reason for the way? / Is the way a reason for living? / Is life a reason for an end?" Step by step the poem climbs from a walk along a path to the meaning of existence, then drops back to the word it has circled all along. If "end" means death, the final line is bleak, since life would exist only to finish. If it means a goal, the line is almost hopeful. Either way, the "end" that closes the poem is the one that opened the chain, so the logic loops and could begin again.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines are short and plain. Repetition does the work that rhyme usually does: "comes" and "goes" answer "coming" and "going," "end" echoes through "ends" and back again, and "Is the…" beats like a drum in the final lines. There is also a shift from open "What" questions to closed "Is" and "Will" questions. The speaker seems to narrow the options, as if someone were cornering the problem, but a yes-or-no question turns out to be no easier to answer than an open one.
What makes the poem worth reading is its economy. It uses nothing but ordinary words such as "new," "else," "way" and "end," and it shows that confusion can have a shape, one built from swapped verbs, doubled meanings and a chain that bites its own tail. It gives no consolation and no answer. Instead it hands the reader the final question and leaves the choice, which meaning of "end" to believe in, to them. Try answering the last line both ways and see how differently the whole poem reads.