Mike is an educated guy, much like he says in the R.A.P. Music opening track, “Big Beast”: “We the readers of the books and the leaders of the crooks” – an educated gangsta, “Amerikkka’s nightmare.”

Cummings’s use of the present tense of “fall” – falls – is immediate, present, and engaging. The sentiment of an action that is happening makes for a very direct connection with the reader and indicates that Cummings wants to express something to be felt and reciprocated by the reader: this falling and loneliness.

As the poem reads, “l(a leaf falls)oneliness,” or “a leaf falls in loneliness” (the parenthetical places itself inside of the word, loneliness), we are certainly prompted to think of what, exactly, Cummings is getting at.

The poem is very broken, the characters are scattered and singular in orientation, and hardly a whole word is presented (see two lines above, one). The main body of the poem seems to be within the parentheses, however, these indicate that their contents are secondary, a side-note to the rest of the poem: loneliness.

Loneliness is broken apart by the parenthetical, the opening parenthesis separating the l from the rest of the word – notice how this l resembles a 1, and how the letter from which it is separated is a (the first letter of the alphabet), and how the next part of loneliness is a word of its own: one, followed again by a singular, 1-resembling l. These all seem to indicate that one is separated from another, perhaps two persons now individual.

To examine the word, loneliness, we notice this does not possess a particularly positive connotation. Instead, loneliness is very distinctly sad, a negative sentiment – one could be in a room full of people and be lonely.

Think of a dedicated, enduring romantic relationship. The Bible puts it best, I think, in that these two become “One Flesh” – they are joined in a way which is almost inseparable (although what Scripture might really mean by this is an entirely different issue), and to separate the two would be to render one flesh, one body, into two. A good relationship gone sour is exemplary of this scattering in which a whole is broken into parts – much like when a leaf falls from a tree, we lose a part of ourselves in the death of a once-powerful relationship, and this is perhaps what Cummings is trying to convey… The scattering effect upon the dissolution of what once was a dedicated, adamantine union.