Six short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and the reader is already slightly adrift, which suits a poem called "Distracted." Nothing in it tells us where the speaker is or why they are distracted. Instead we get three small scenes of attention sliding from one sense to another. The central idea seems to be that distraction is not simply a failure to concentrate. It can be a way of staying alive to the world, or a way of protecting oneself from too much of one thing.
The opening couplet, "my books / brought home books," is the trickiest, and it is deliberately double-edged. Read plainly, it describes a habit every reader knows: the books you own lead you to other books, which you carry home, so that reading breeds more reading. But "brought home" is also an idiom for making something vivid or undeniable, as when a story brings home a truth. Perhaps the speaker's books have made other books feel real, or made the idea of a book feel real. The repeated word "books" turns the line into a small loop that feeds on itself, which is exactly what distraction does: one thing leads to the next. Whether this is a pleasure or a burden, the poem doesn't say. Overloaded eyes, though, are quietly implied.
The second stanza turns from the eye to the ear: "my ear is a witness / to other water." Calling an ear a "witness" borrows the language of courtrooms and religious testimony, as though simply hearing something were a serious act. And "other water" is wonderfully open. Judging by the wording, it could be rain or a stream heard beyond the room, or water remembered rather than present, or something that only sounds like water. The word "other" matters most. It suggests a world running alongside the speaker's, one the books cannot supply. The soft repeated w of "witness" and "water" gives the line a gentle, flowing sound, so the sense and the sound do the same work.
The last stanza completes the shift between senses: "I play orange music / to save my eyes." Here the senses blur. Music has a colour, and that colour is warm. Set beside the water of the previous stanza, orange also reads, in my interpretation, as its opposite, a fiery counterpart to something cool and blue, though the poem never says so. The final purpose clause is unexpected. We might expect music to save the ears or lift the mood, but this speaker uses sound to rest the eyes. The books have worn out the sense of sight, and listening becomes the remedy. "Save" is a strong verb for something so small, which gives the ending both humour and a touch of urgency.
Formally, the poem is spare and unrhymed. Its three stanzas are each a pair of short lines, so it moves in even steps while the subject matter wanders. The rhythm is loose, speech-like, but the lines are tightly shaped: the last one, "to save my eyes," is brief and closes the poem with a firm, quiet click. Sound ties it together without rhyme. The long "i" of "I," "my" and "eyes" circles back through the final stanza, while the "m" of "my" and "music" hums beneath it. The poem also sets "ear" and "eyes" at its two ends, so the sensory journey has a clear frame.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks of us in so little space. It never explains itself; the gaps between stanzas are where the thinking happens. The poem is itself "distracted," moving from books to water to music with no connecting logic, yet the shifts feel natural, like a mind drifting in a quiet room. It suggests that attention is not a single beam but something shared among the senses, and that sometimes the best way to look after one sense is to hand the job to another. A reader who finishes it, looks up from the page, and notices a sound they had been ignoring has probably understood it.