Mike Stone starts with a piece of physics: string theory's idea that the universe has eleven dimensions instead of the three we see. The speaker borrows that idea and applies it to a very private problem. Love, he says, begins as a hopeful slide toward heaven but ends in "disaffection," a flat, cooling-off kind of letdown. Then the poem turns darker. If a version of him lives in every dimension, he reasons, then killing himself in one would mean being dead in all of them.
The tone is cool and almost clinical, as if he's working out a logic puzzle, and that calm is what makes the ending so chilling. The science seems to offer a way out, since a lost love might be survivable somewhere else, but the speaker finds no escape in it. Judging by the lines, the poem suggests a person who feels trapped by his own despair, with no other universe to hide in. The broken rhythm and unrhymed final lines add to the sense of something giving way.