Alone with Everybody
Alone with Everybody - meaning Summary
Loneliness Beneath the Surface
This poem presents loneliness as a universal condition, arguing that people are bodies masking a deeper emptiness and a perpetual search for more than flesh. The speaker portrays casual sexual encounter as a futile substitute for connection, with repeated images of bodies, rooms, and an endless pursuit that never finds the one
. Across stark urban scenes—the city, junkyards, hospitals, graveyards—the sense of fate and failure grows; nothing else fills the void. The overall message is a bleak view of human relations: we are trapped in a singular, unfulfilled existence.
The flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and the men drink too much and nobody finds the one but keep looking crawling in and out of beds. Flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. There's no chance at all: We are all trapped by a singular fate. Nobody ever finds the one. The city dumps fill, the junkyards fill, the madhouses fill, the hospitals fill, the graveyards fill... Nothing else fills.
... especially the void we seek to fill within.