Boredom is the starting gun. "If I don't have anything to do," the speaker begins, in a flat, throwaway voice, and what follows is a small daydream: is there anywhere left that nobody has got to first? The word "Sometimes" stands alone above the first line, and it sets the register. This is a passing mood that drifts in during idle moments, not a manifesto.
What he goes looking for is a silence, a "hungry tuft of earth," and finally a woman. The silence is the most vivid. It hasn't just been interrupted but "honked away by horns," and the verb is wonderfully rude. Noise doesn't disturb the quiet here so much as remove it, as though the horns, presumably traffic, were a kind of pest control. The h-sounds of "honked," "horns" and "hungry" bark across the lines, so the poem makes a little of the racket it complains about. A "tuft" is a small thing, a patch you could easily overlook, and calling it "hungry" gives the last scrap of green an appetite, as if it were starving for room.
The poem's real daring lies in its grammar. The familiar notice "Keep off the grass" is crammed into "hasn't been keep off the grassed." A command becomes a participle, and "grass" becomes a verb. The ungrammatical "keep" where "kept" belongs makes the language seem to buckle under the weight of the very rules it describes. "Asphalt lain" works more quietly. Standard English would say "laid," but "lain" is what a thing does when it rests, so the road seems to have settled in permanently, like something asleep that will never be woken.
Then comes the line set apart by a gap: "Some woman that hasn't been my wifed." The trick is repeated. "Wife," a noun, is forced into the shape of a past participle, just as "grass" was. Placed beside the silence and the tuft, the woman joins a list of things that can be used up, fenced off or paved over. This is the poem's sharpest and most uncomfortable moment, because the speaker's longing for something unclaimed ends in what sounds like a claim. "My wifed" has the ring of possession. Whether he is a husband daydreaming about another life, or a man ruefully noticing that he treats people as territory, the poem doesn't say. Judging by the text alone, both readings stay open. What is clear is that the joke curdles. We smile at "wifed," then notice who has been grouped with the grass.
The form suits that sudden turn. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, and its short, conversational lines have the pace of someone thinking aloud. There is no end punctuation until the final full stop, so the whole thing runs as one loose sentence. It is strung along a repeated "some": "some silence," "Some hungry tuft," "Some woman." That repetition quietly echoes the title, since "Sometimes" contains both "some" and "times." The longing recurs at intervals and attaches itself to different objects. The stanza break before the last line works like a held breath before an admission.
In seven short lines the poem links noise, regulation, road-building and marriage as versions of the same urge, the urge to occupy. That is a lot to carry for something so modest in tone. Its made-up verbs, "grassed" and "wifed," seem to be the real subject. They suggest that language is one of the tools by which things get claimed, because once a noun can be turned into something done to a thing, almost anything can be done to anything. The speaker's wistfulness is genuine, but it is also tangled up in the habits he wishes he could escape. A reader finishes the poem wondering what is left that hasn't been turned into a verb, and who is doing the verbing.