Few poems open with a verdict as blunt as "Nothing is as worthless as an old man's love." Mike Stone's «Worthless» puts its title word in the first line, then spends the rest of its length testing whether that judgement is cruel or simply true. The simile that follows is oddly quiet: "A piece of shell unlooked for in the sand." A shell is the empty house of something that once lived, so even this small image has death inside it. "Unlooked for" cuts two ways, since the love is both unexpected and unwanted. The sand it lies in quietly plants a seed that the final line will harvest.
The poem then explains where such love comes from, and the explanation flatters no one. It is "the infant in his heart / That desires the young woman's breast." What looks like romance is hunger, an old appetite dressed in adult feeling. The next stanza answers with a mirror image, "the child in her" that "recoils / From death's nearness / And the touch of flesh's decay." Infant and child, he and she: the symmetry is exact, and neither person is granted adult dignity. The short lines slow the reading down, and "From death's nearness" sits alone, as if the flinch happens in the white space around it.
The most striking move comes when the breast changes roles. "That breast will droop to suckle / Death's searching lips soon enough." First an object of desire, then of nourishment, it ends by feeding death itself, imagined as one more baby. "Searching" recalls an infant's blind rooting for the nipple, so beginning and ending fold into a single gesture. "Droop" is deliberately unglamorous. The poem will not soften what the young woman's body is heading toward.
At this point the pronouns widen from "he" and "her" to "we," and the language sharpens into a pun: "We consume each other / Rather than consummate." The two verbs sound almost alike but pull in opposite directions, one using up and the other completing. The poem suggests that love driven by terror of dying can only devour, never fulfil. The motive is stated flatly: "our greedy clinging to life's next breath." "Breath" echoes "breast" from a few lines earlier, the same opening sounds attached to the same basic need.
There is no rhyme, and the poem does without the comfort rhyme offers. Yet it begins close to the beat of iambic pentameter, with its first two lines running ten or eleven syllables, and then loosens into irregular free verse, the lines shrinking and stretching as the argument turns. The ending returns to weight. "We are no more than what we've always been" is plain, almost entirely one-syllable words. Then "Dust, dying suns, and space" piles up hard stresses and the d-sounds of "Dust, dying," and finishes on "space," a word that leaves the sentence open to emptiness. The scale jumps from a single embrace to the cosmos, and even the stars are given the verb "dying."
What makes the poem matter is its refusal to sentimentalise. An old man and a young woman could easily become comedy or scandal. Stone treats the pairing as an extreme case of something universal. The title's word turns back on all of us. If love is fear of death wearing the mask of desire, and we are only dust and dying suns, then "worthless" stops being an insult aimed at one old man. Whether the poem believes this or is testing how bleak a view can get is left open. The cold tone invites a reader to argue back, and that tension keeps the poem alive after a very short read.