A Sweet Disorder - Analysis

The drink order as a mask for need

The poem’s central claim feels quietly desperate: social ritual can be perfectly performed and still fail to deliver recognition. It opens with a polite, almost stagey exchange: Pardon my sarong, I’ll have a Shirley Temple, the server’s Certainly, sir, the fuss over whether a cherry is part of it. The voice tries on manners the way it tries on clothing, as if correct phrasing might make the self legible. Even the French flourish de rigueur turns taste into a rule-book the speaker fears failing. Under the light comedy sits a more serious wish: to be seen as someone who belongs.

Sweetness, rules, and the problem of the cherry

The cherry becomes the poem’s miniature of conformity. The speaker doesn’t want it exactly; they want what it represents: the right accessory, the accepted version of the drink, the approved version of a person. Some of them likes it, the server says, a tiny reminder that preference exists—yet the speaker still lands on Well, I’ll have a cherry, as if choice must be converted back into obligation. The poem calls itself a disorder in its title, but it’s a sweet disorder: the disarray is coated in politeness, sugar, and agreed-upon scripts.

The hinge: from being served to being forgotten

Then the poem turns hard: He doesn’t even remember me. The earlier dialogue suddenly reads like a prelude—small talk to keep from naming the hurt. The world becomes washed in a memory glow (nice, beautiful day), but it’s a glow that can’t revive what’s missing. A favorite foxtrot plays; there are neckties they used to wear; the speaker says, You could rely on that. What’s reliable is not love or attention, but the set dressing of the past: music, fashion, the predictable props of an era. Against them stands the brutal unreliability of another person’s memory.

Time panic and the search for the right container

The last section snaps into anxious present tense: My gosh, it’s already 7:30. Time becomes a deadline, not a flow. The question Are these our containers? echoes the earlier In my commuter mug—the poem keeps asking what is supposed to hold things: a drink, a day, a relationship, a self. The commuter mug implies life on the move, experience carried rather than savored. That portability is convenient, but it also hints that nothing is allowed to stay open on the table long enough to be understood.

Pardon my past: apology as identity

When the speaker says Pardon my past, it echoes Pardon my sarong, making history feel like another outfit you might be embarrassed to show up in. The apology is revealing: the speaker assumes the past is an imposition on others, something to excuse before anyone can object. Yet in the next breath the speaker insists it was all one piece, a striking claim of continuity—no chapters, no clean breaks, just one long fabric of experience. The tension here is sharp: the speaker both downplays the past (as apology) and insists on its totalizing weight (as one piece). If the past is truly one piece, then being forgotten isn’t a minor social mishap; it’s an amputation.

Escaped attention and the final doubt

The line It can’t have escaped your escaped your attention stutters, repeating escaped as if the mind can’t keep hold of the accusation. The speaker wants to argue—I would argue—but even that arrives softened, hypothetical, almost mannerly. And the question How was it supposed to look? returns us to the cherry problem: the fear of getting the appearance wrong, of failing the template. The poem ends on the most basic uncertainty: Do I wake or sleep? It’s not just disorientation; it’s the possibility that the whole scene—ordering, remembering, pleading—has been happening in a half-state where agency is reduced to repeating scripts.

If he doesn’t remember, what is the speaker trying to preserve? The poem seems to suggest that the rituals—the cherry, the commuter mug, the foxtrot—are attempts to keep experience from spilling out. But the most frightening idea is that the container might be the problem: that memory, once poured into something portable and polite, becomes easier for others to carry away and forget.