A lowered hat and a hunched overcoat: that is all Mike Stone's poem shows of its central figure. There is no face, no name, no story, only clothing moving through empty streets. The poem is about extreme loneliness, but it never says why the man is alone, and it is stronger for that. What it explores is the experience of being unseen by everyone except yourself. The title may remind some readers of Gogol's story of the same name, which also ends with a ghost in the streets. Nothing in the text confirms a link, though, and the poem stands perfectly well without it.
The opening line, "Paler than the endless night", is a small puzzle. Night is dark, so what could be paler than it? The answer is a ghost, and the simile "Push ghostlike" confirms the idea a line later. The figure is reduced to garments, a kind of empty outline. The comparison "streets emptier / Than the vacuous space surrounding an unknown planet" then pushes the emptiness outward to the scale of the universe. The cosmic ambition is deflated by the sour joke that this galaxy "never mattered to any poor soul / Or god with too much time on his hands." The colloquial phrase drags the grand vision down to the level of shrugging, tired speech. It also plants a theme that returns throughout: time. Moments "evaporate" like "someone else's dreams on waking," which is a precise image of forgetting, since we barely care about our own dreams and care even less about other people's. The man is treated the same way.
The middle of the poem turns the world against him in small, quiet steps. "With each footstep a window shuts, / A shutter pulled inward, a door closed." The three closures are arranged in sequence, and the grammar drifts from the active "shuts" to the passive "pulled" and "closed," as if nobody is even responsible for the rejection. It simply happens. Then the walls "stretch themselves higher inaccessibly," a personification that makes the buildings seem to act, and the "muffled voices turn into quiet whispers." Sound shrinks as the man moves through it. The poem leaves open whether the town is truly shunning him or whether this is how he perceives it, and that ambiguity makes the scene more unsettling.
The most striking moment is a shift in pronouns. Until now the figure has been a thing, a coat and a hat, and the ghost "shrieks its utter loneliness." In the very next line it "impels himself forward." The "its" becomes "himself" mid-sentence, as though a person is briefly recovered from the object. The verb matters too. He does not walk or stride but "impels himself," which suggests compulsion rather than purpose. The next line, "Backward, sideways, or stops altogether:", has no clear grammatical home. It hangs loose from the sentence before it, and its colon promises an explanation that never comes. The syntax stumbles in the same way the man does, and his direction no longer matters.
Stone uses no rhyme and no regular metre. Line lengths swing from the long, sprawling planet sentence to the short "With each footstep a window shuts," and the absence of rhyme suits a poem about the absence of connection. Instead of sound-patterns that link lines together, there is a cluster of negative prefixes: "unknown," "inaccessibly," "Undesired and unremembered," "unable." Each pushes the man further from the world. The final paradox is the sharpest: he is forgotten by everyone, "But still unable to forget himself." Being ignored is bearable only if you can ignore yourself too, and he cannot.
The last image is deliberately ugly: "Burrowing like a maggot towards time's end." After the airy ghost, the poem lands on decay, on something small, low and feeding on the dead. The man is both spirit and corpse-eater, and the downward motion of burrowing cancels the earlier floating. The lack of a closing full stop in the text leaves him still moving.
The poem is significant because it avoids easy pity. It does not offer a consoling voice or a reason, only a sustained, concrete picture of what it feels like to be erased while still being conscious. In a few lines it makes the city, the cosmos and time itself seem indifferent to one person, and it lets that indifference be heard in the quietness of its own language.