Ram Krishna Singh's "Passion" is about the misery of growing older while desire refuses to fade. The speaker begins with a bleak admission: anxieties don't ease with age, and a fire keeps raging inside him that he can't put out. Drugs, which might once have helped, now barely work, and ecstasy feels impossibly distant.
The mood is restless and worn down. Sleep, which should offer relief, only carries him "through dried roses to nightmares." The dried roses suggest romance and beauty that have withered but still cling to memory. When he says "I smell hell all day," the suffering isn't confined to the night; it follows him everywhere.
The ending is quietly painful. His passions are "shrinking," yet they still torment him, and they shrink "in the hollow of my mind." That phrase suggests emptiness and isolation. The poem's fragmented, unpunctuated lines mirror his frayed state, leaving a feeling of frustration, loneliness, and exhaustion.