Five short lines, and already there is a stench. Michael John Pickering opens "Poems of the Night 2" with a confession that is oddly physical: "I surely reek / of what I have seen." Sight is the sense we trust to keep its distance, since we look at things across a gap. Smell has no such gap. It is breathed in, it clings to skin and clothes, and the person carrying it is often the last to notice. By turning seeing into reeking, the speaker suggests that what he witnessed has not stayed in memory as a picture. It has soaked into his body.
The second sentence supplies the reason, and it is stranger than the claim. "For I surely know / that the words I spew / are the shapes they shy at." The poem never says what was seen, and that silence is its method. We get the aftermath, not the event. The central idea seems to be that a witness cannot report a horror cleanly, because the telling reproduces it. The words are not a neutral container. They take on the shape of the thing itself, and listeners recoil from them as they would from the thing.
The word choices carry the argument. "Spew" is a verb of vomiting, involuntary and unpleasant, the opposite of the careful, chosen speech we usually associate with "words." The speaker does not say he tells or recounts or testifies. His speech comes up like something the body has to reject. "Shy" is a word we know from skittish horses, and it brings in an animal flinch that no one decides on. Read against the title, the night setting is an inference, but a tempting one. Shapes in the dark are exactly what makes a horse bolt. The pronoun "they" is left open. It most naturally means listeners, though the words themselves flinching from their own forms is also possible. Either reading leaves the speaker stuck between what he must say and what no one can bear to hear.
"Surely" appears twice, in the first and third lines, and it gives the voice a defensive edge. People reach for that word when they expect to be doubted, or when they are trying to talk themselves into certainty. It also feeds the poem's sound. Surely, seen, spew, shapes and shy all lean on the hissing s and sh, so the poem sounds as if it is being spat through the teeth. "Reek" and "seen" are not a rhyme, but their shared long e links the first two lines like a thin thread of assonance. Beyond that, the poem is free verse with no end-rhyme and no fixed meter.
The lines are tiny, running from about four to six syllables, and each one is a little longer than the last. The pressure builds as the poem goes on. Look, too, at the pronouns. "I" appears in each of the first four lines (reek, seen, know, spew), so the speaker is wrapped up in himself and his own contamination. Then the final line drops "I" altogether and ends on "they." The poem closes by turning away from the self toward the people who flinch. It also ends on "at," a small unstressed preposition left dangling, so the sentence stops mid-recoil and does not land on a solid noun.
There is a neat circle in the imagery as well. The poem starts with something seen and ends with "shapes," a visual word. Words, which we hear, have become things we look at, so the reader is brought back to the eye that did the original damage. The poem will not let sight, smell and speech stay in separate compartments. They bleed into each other the way the experience has bled into the speaker.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It refuses the flattering picture of the witness as someone noble and clear-eyed. This speaker gets no dignity from having seen, only a smell he cannot wash off and a voice that disgusts even him. By withholding the event, the poem also makes the reader take part. We never see the thing, only its odor and the shapes people shy from, and if we feel our own flinch, the poem has quietly proved its point. A reader who finishes it uneasy has done what the poem's listeners do.