Before "Desire" says anything about desire, it has already corrected itself. The opening claims that wrong words are sometimes misheard "as the correct ones," and then a bracketed "Correction" arrives to say there are no correct words at all, "only those more or less sufficient." The speaker edits their own sentence and leaves the edit visible. That habit of doubting and revising, and of refusing a tidy answer, runs through the whole poem and carries its central idea: language, perception and desire are all unreliable instruments, and the honest thing is to admit it.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the poem has a visual rhythm. Lines are pushed across the page ("as the correct ones," "to the balance," "How obvious"), so the reader has to hesitate, as if the speaker keeps stepping back before going on. The ampersand appears three times, giving a jotted, hurried feel, and it often links opposites: "despondency / & excitement; solidarity & isolation." These are the neat pairs we use to explain ourselves, and the poem sets them up in order to doubt them.
The imagery in the first half is compressed and bitter. "Dream disguised as prophecies while / all prophets are despised" captures a small irony: we dress our wishes up as predictions, yet have no patience for anyone who truly warns us. Days are either "a sombre parade / gliding quietly by" or something "screaming as it runs into the night." The sound does the work here. "Gliding quietly" is soft and slow, while "screaming" and "runs" speed up and break. The "either... or" leaves no ordinary middle, only numbness or panic.
Then comes the question that gives the poem its title: "Were these fiercely defended fantasies / created only to be destroyed?" "Fiercely defended" makes the fantasies sound like fortresses, built with effort and guarded with pride. The next question, "Is that why / we still desire them?", hangs on its line break after "why." The suggestion is uncomfortable. Desire may thrive precisely because what we want was always going to be lost.
The bridge is the poem's most striking image. "The urge to leap when crossing / a bridge" is a sudden, strange impulse that many people recognise, and the poem observes that it "so rarely corresponds / to the balance" of our moods. After the paired opposites, the list changes shape: "love, / indifference, / ideation." Each word gets its own line and the pairing stops. "Ideation" is a clinical word, and beside the image of leaping it hints at darker thoughts. The poem never says so outright, so this is an inference from the text. What it does seem to say is that our inner impulses do not follow a tidy ledger of feelings. We cannot always trace where they come from, and the poem lets that stay unresolved.
The ending turns from the inner world to seeing. "How obvious / it seems in hindsight" has a faintly rueful tone, the wisdom that comes after the event. The claim that "colour depends upon more than light" is both a fact and a metaphor. What we see depends on whether we "close or open our eyes," on "the strength of our sight," and on "what / we choose to see, / or if // we look away." The gap on the page before "we look away" is itself a small act of looking away. The responsibility shifts quietly to the viewer, because desire takes its colour partly from us.
What makes the poem worth studying is that it enacts its idea instead of only stating it. Mishearing a word, misreading a mood and misjudging a colour are treated as versions of one problem, which is that we never get the world or ourselves in clear, correct terms. The poem offers no consoling solution, and its refusal to pretend has a steadying effect. It also shows how much a poem can do with space, punctuation and a single bracketed correction. Nothing outside the page is needed to feel its uncertainty.