Mark Maxey's speaker is stuck between wanting to speak and shutting himself down. He opens with a friend's remark about being mistaken for gay, and his reply, that being gay isn't bad, only lonely, seems to say as much about his own isolation as anyone else's. Watching a film of poetry, he admires others' honesty but goes quiet when his turn comes. He feels shut out of his own space even though he "has the key."
From there the poem turns to old dreams that went nowhere, and then to dirt. He pictures it as the remains of people who struggled before us, and he wants to lie in it, let it clothe him, and keep moving. The mood shifts from lonely and doubtful to defiant. By the end he wonders whether everyone else is just an illusion, yet he doesn't care. Balanced on a "pin head," he settles on one fact: right now, he is alive.