Most poems about sadness try to name it. Mike Stone's "Sands of Sadnesses" admits it can't. "Can't put my finger on it," the speaker says, and the rest of the poem shows what happens to a feeling with no clear shape: it leaks out sideways, through puns, slips of the tongue and scraps of fairy tale. The central idea seems to be that grief which can't be spoken doesn't disappear. It bends the language, and eventually the person carrying it.
The opening makes this physical. "Thou / Sands" is "thousands" cut in half, and when the word returns whole ("Thousands of sadnesses") we can hear what the break did. A number became a pile of grains, the sands of the title. The odd plural "sadnesses" suggests that one word for the feeling isn't enough, and that it comes in countable, trickling pieces. Then comes the stuck repetition of "Want to come out / Won't come out." The next line breaks another word: "Thy reign is / Fall / ing on the more." Read by ear, "reign" is "rain" and "more" is "moor," so a ruler's power collapses and weather settles over open ground at the same moment. The archaic "Thou" and "Thy" fit this too, as if the speaker were addressing some old, grand authority, perhaps sadness itself.
The middle of the poem swerves into something like a nursery tale. "Blonde Belinda Tulips / Tok-tok-talking at the door" is all hard consonants, and the stutter in "Tok-tok-talking" is the knocking it describes. The visitor invites us to "take a bite of my poison Apollo." Judging by the sound and the poisoned fruit offered at a door, "Apollo" seems to stand in for "apple," and the Snow White story is a plausible echo. Apollo is also the Greek god of the sun, music and poetry, which adds a glint of grandeur to the offer. The speaker is now the tempter, coaxing in a familiar sales-pitch rhythm: "You will die it / You will like it." The expected "try it" has been swapped for "die it," so the slip says the hidden part aloud. "Infinite" gets a line to itself, and the taste of the poison stretches on with nothing after it.
What follows is the poem's bleakest stretch. "All you know will be / as it was before you were" imagines a return to the state before existence. Then the sentence collapses into "Wish you were," which sounds like the start of a postcard line with "here" missing. The gap is part of the meaning: the grammar has lost its destination, just as the wish has.
The raindrop that "Springs from the puddle / As though rejected" is the poem's cleanest image, and it echoes the falling "reign." A drop that bounces back up refuses to land. That matches the sadness that wants out but won't come out, and it prepares the last stanza. There the speaker's "consciousness / lugs its body around," which reverses the usual order so that the mind is a porter and the body its luggage. The journey "from party to parting" uses two almost identical words to flatten social life into a string of arrivals and exits. It ends with "enough / vodka to drown in." After the sand, the rain and the puddle, the poem's water arrives as something chosen, a way to take in what couldn't be let out. The word "enough" counts and measures like the "thousands" at the start, and the joke is black.
Free verse suits all this. There is no regular meter, and the lines swing from single words to full phrases. Sound still pulls the poem together: "more," "door" and "before" chime across different stanzas like a nursery rhyme heard through a wall. The final stanza is the steadiest and most complete in its syntax, as though the wordplay has been dropped and the speaker is simply saying it.
The poem is worth reading because its puns work as symptoms. The broken words carry the feeling the speaker says can't be located. Reading it aloud, you can hear how music and dread sit together, and how a poem can be precise about a feeling it refuses to define.