Ten short lines, and a speaker who cannot forgive themselves for being alive. Haunted by nightmares, they wish they had died in place of someone called Daisy. The poem never says who Daisy is or how she died. The word "killed" hints at a cause, but nothing more. That silence works in the poem's favour, because it keeps the focus on the feeling rather than the event. The central idea is survivor's guilt: the conviction that the speaker's continued life is itself an injustice.
The first stanza sets the tone with the verb "plague", a word from disease and catastrophe, so the nightmares seem like an infection that cannot be shaken off. "Day and night" closes off any escape. Then come two wishes, and they differ in a telling way. "I wish I was the one killed instead of her" is a blunt, almost bargaining trade of one life for another. "I wish she didn't stop breathing" is much smaller and quieter. "Stop breathing" is a plain, domestic phrase, and the speaker is bargaining here with the tiniest possible change to the past.
Breathing then becomes the poem's quiet obsession. In the second stanza the speaker says, "I still feel the air and breathe it." They do not say "I am alive". They name the most ordinary bodily act, which now feels like an accusation. It echoes "stop breathing" from the stanza before, so the same action marks the line between the two people. Against it stands "cold as ice", a familiar simile, but its familiarity suits a voice that does not decorate its grief. The temperature contrast does the work: the speaker feels air moving, while Daisy's body is cold. The one real stretch of figurative language is "the unforgiving ground". The ground is personified as harsh and final, yet "unforgiving" lets the speaker's own need for forgiveness slip through. It is easy to wonder who is really being refused it.
The last stanza turns on a colloquial phrase. "Guts" normally means courage, but it also means the body's insides, and here it carries a bitter edge. The speaker treats ordinary walking as a nerve, even a shameless one. The line break helps. "That I have the guts to walk" pauses on an everyday action before "when she never will again" takes it away. The poem ends on "again", with no comfort and no lesson offered.
The form supports this refusal to tidy things up. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are uneven in length. The stanzas run three, four, three lines, so the longest stanza, where the speaker dwells on the body and the grave, sits between two shorter ones. What binds the poem is repetition, especially of "unfair". "How unfair is it" is an outburst, with its twisted, spilling-out word order. By the end it has become the flat statement "It's unfair", as if the outrage has worn down into fact. The voice is a spoken one throughout. The title's "Should've", the grammar of "I wish I was", and the uneven capital letters all suggest speech or something written in a rush, whether by design or not. Daisy is also the name of a flower, and it is hard not to hear that beside the image of burial, though the poem does not push the connection.
The poem is significant because it is honest about something other poems often hurry past. Many poems about loss move toward consolation, acceptance or a sense that the dead live on. This one stays inside the stage where none of that helps, where grief takes the form of self-blame. Its plain vocabulary is part of its strength, since the speaker sounds like a real person talking rather than someone composing a memorial. The same plainness has a cost: phrases like "cold as ice" are well-worn, and the poem rarely surprises with its language. What it gives in return is directness. For a student reader, it shows how a handful of simple words, a repeated idea and a carefully placed line break can make the unbearable seem close.