Leisure, in this poem, is not what the title promises. Michael John Pickering begins with a body in trouble: "When I stopped working / I dug my nails in my brows / I dug my nails in my brows and wheezed." The poem never says why work stopped, and it doesn't need to. What matters is the shock of the stop. The repeated line, with "and wheezed" added on the second pass, sounds like a breath caught and then released. The speaker seems to be pressing on his own face to check he is still there.
The first stanza ends on its most compact line: "Now, I know, I knew, I am new." The verbs shift from present to past and back, like someone running through a conjugation in a language he is only now learning. Sound drives the line too, since "know," "knew" and "new" nearly rhyme. Knowing and being new are made to feel like the same event. Understanding something is also becoming someone else.
The second stanza loosens the syntax to match. The speaker returns "to read old words / to come to myself to / hear music murmuring through the outer door." The dangling "to" at the end of a line leaves the thought unfinished, so the reader drifts the way the speaker does. "Music murmuring" slows the line with its soft m's. The phrase "outer door" quietly implies an inner one, and the speaker seems to be on the threshold between the two. Another phrase carries leftover office language: he wants to "open my thoughts from a closed file." Even his inner life is filed. Then comes "a farness, a slowness, of", where Pickering invents nouns and ends on a dangling "of." The next line is the single word "time," alone with white space around it. Time is slowed down on the page.
The poem then makes its strangest move, setting the speaker against "more exactness of measure / in the cool room / where sperm and embryo are stored." This is the language of a laboratory, a place of suspended life and potential, kept cold and waiting. It connects back to "I am new": a self in storage, not yet born into its next phase. The setting is also oddly precise, a counterweight to the vague, murmuring stanza before it. The poem seems to want both softness and exactness.
The final lines give that exactness a body. The speaker sits on the floor "as a level (spirit)," hangs from the beam "as a line (plumb)," and stands on the table "as a balance (beam)." The progression of sit, hang and stand turns the retired or idle body into a set of instruments, and the parentheses supply each tool's name like a gloss. The wordplay is hard to ignore. A "spirit" level measures flatness, but the word also suggests the soul. "Plumb" means a weighted line, and it also means perfectly vertical. "Beam" appears twice, first as the thing he hangs from, then as part of the balance he becomes, so the support and the scale are one object. "Hang from the beam" may also carry a darker undertone, though the playful, almost exercise-like tone keeps it from tipping over. That ambiguity is part of the poem's honesty.
The idea at the center is that the work that used to measure the speaker, in hours and output, has been replaced by a stranger kind of measuring. Leisure is not rest here. It is calibration, a testing of whether he is level, upright and balanced. The poem is free verse with no regular rhyme or meter, and its rhythm is breath-driven, built from repetition, broken lines and one stranded word. That is what keeps it from being a sentimental poem about slowing down. It treats slowing down as work of a different kind, uncomfortable and exact, and a little funny. The man who stopped working is still working, now on himself.