Mike Stone's poem follows a lonely figure, seen only as a lowered hat and a hunched overcoat, moving through deserted streets at night. The speaker describes him as a ghost, and the comparisons make his isolation enormous: the streets are emptier than space around an unknown planet in a galaxy that never mattered to anyone, not even to a bored god. As he walks, the world closes against him. Windows shut, doors close, walls seem to grow taller, and voices shrink to whispers.
The feeling is bleak, but the poem is not simply sad. The figure shrieks his loneliness, then seems lost about which way to go, forward, backward, sideways, or nowhere at all. He is forgotten by others yet cannot forget himself. The closing image of a maggot burrowing toward the end of time is deliberately ugly, suggesting a life reduced to crawling on. The mood is cold, hollow, and quietly desperate.