This is a disrupted or confused state of affairs; things are in disarray. This expression comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. When the hero has just learned that he is to avenge his father’s murder by his uncle, he says, “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right” (1.5). The poet’s allusion to a dislocated bony joint was taken up by others, but it may now be obsolescent.