The title delivers its verdict before the poem has said a word. "Hapless" comes from the old word *hap*, meaning luck or chance, so a hapless person is simply someone without luck. But as the poem goes on, luck stops looking like the problem. What the speaker describes is a failure of fit, a body and mind that cannot manage the ordinary business of being alive. The central idea is a quiet, almost comic confession of unsuitability, which ends in something close to a plea.
The opening image is a clever muddle. A "morning storm" suggests noise, pressure and weather, but it happens "in the cotton / between my ears." Cotton muffles. The storm is real, yet it reaches us through padding, like a head thick with sleeplessness or a hangover. The phrase sets up a feeling the whole poem keeps up: something is raging, and the speaker can only half hear it. There is a small joke in "between my ears," too, since it is the plainest way of pointing at a head and yet makes the head sound like an empty room.
The second stanza turns from the head to language. "We lose ourselves / in high terms" is the poem's only use of "we," and it feels like an admission about how people talk: in lofty, abstract words that carry us away from our bodies. The speaker's own mouth is "a blind hole." The line has no verb, which matters. Nothing happens in it; it is a flat label, like a diagnosis. A mouth ought to speak and taste and take things in, but here it is a hole that cannot see where it is going. After the grand "high terms," the mouth is a dead end.
Then comes the hinge: "the same as every / other body but." The word "but" is left dangling at the end of the line, and the stanza break forces us to wait for the exception. That small delay is where the poem's tension sits. The speaker claims to be like everyone else, and the sentence immediately starts to take that back. What follows is oddly modest: "I could not sleep / on the ground." The exception is not a grand tragedy but a physical limit, the sort of thing a person says when they learn they are not built for camping, hardship or roughing it. It is funny for a moment, and then it isn't, because sleeping on the ground quietly stands for being at home in the world.
Notice the direction the poem moves in. It begins in the head (ears), passes through the mouth, widens to the whole "body," and settles on "the ground." This is a descent, and it answers the "high terms" of the second stanza. Language floats upward, while the body keeps dragging the speaker back down to earth, where he cannot rest.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and the lines are short, with no steady metre. That makes the poem read like a thought as it occurs, unfinished and a little hesitant. The sounds do some gentle work: the soft, repeated *m* of "morning," "between," "my," "mouth," "my" gives the opening a mumbling quality, while "high," "blind" and "hole" stretch out their long vowels like a sigh. The pronoun "I" doesn't appear as a subject until the fourth stanza, after "my ears," "we" and "my mouth." The speaker comes forward only when he has a limitation to report.
The ending is the most striking move. "see how unable / I am to live" is an imperative, as though the reader has been invited to examine an exhibit. The speaker chooses "unable," not "unwilling," so this is not rebellion or despair put on for effect but a flat statement of incapacity. The plain, one-syllable words give it a bare, unprotected tone. It could be read as a joke, a cry for help, or both at once, and the poem never settles which.
That ambiguity is what makes it worth reading. In a handful of lines it takes an everyday weariness and lets it grow into a question about whether one can belong in one's own body. It does this without self-pity or explanation, and it trusts the reader to look.