Heartbreak is usually written as sorrow, but Abbian Teape's "Is It Me or You?" is more interested in the moment sorrow turns into anger. The poem moves from numbness to blame to a wish for revenge, and its closing lines show that the revenge is really a confession of the speaker's own wound.
The first stanza describes a person who feels nothing. "Dull eyes, unable to cry. / Numbed hands, unable to hurt. / Crippled heart, unable to leap" is a triplet built on repetition, with each body part paired with something it can no longer do. The sentence structure is as stuck as the person it describes. The opening line, "Ain't no getting over it is there?", sounds like someone talking to themselves, and "Painted blue when you'd rather be neutral" implies that the sadness was applied from outside, like a coat of paint nobody chose. Even the line "Never asked for emotions" sounds more tired than angry.
The title asks "me or you?", and the pronouns seem to answer it. In the first two stanzas, "you" appears to be the speaker's own self, held at a distance: "Who did this to you? / Who made you hallow?" (the spelling is the poet's, and the context suggests "hollow"). The speaker questions whether the person they blame is really the cause. By the third stanza the "you" has changed. "Yes, you did this to me" is the poem's turning point, and the word "Yes" sounds like an argument finally won. This is a reading of the pronouns, but it explains why the poem feels as if it changes direction mid-breath.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular rhythm. Its four eight-line stanzas and two-line ending give it a tidy shape, while the lines inside are uneven. Short lines like "No one..." and "I hate you, / I hate you." land hard because the lines around them are longer. The repetition of "I hate you" reads like someone saying it again to convince themselves.
The imagery makes the shift from cold to hot physical. The first stanza is full of deadness. In the second, "Set fire to my carefree decisions" introduces heat, and in the third the emotion rises "in my chest, / Rising up my throat." The tears in the last stanza are "Hot and with meaning," which answers the earlier "unable to cry." The speaker has gone from not being able to feel anything to being overwhelmed. The poem also echoes its own words. "Numbed hands, unable to hurt" returns as "To hurt you back," so the capacity to be hurt becomes the wish to hurt someone else.
The vocabulary is also uneven in a revealing way. Mostly the language is plain and spoken, but then "Dichotomy, contradicting" appears, a stiff, abstract phrase in the middle of the emotion. It reads like the speaker reaching for a clinical word to explain how love and harm could come from the same person. "Gave me lies wrapped in purposeful deceit" turns the language of gift-giving against the lover, since lies are what the speaker was handed. The phrase also piles up near-synonyms, as if one word for betrayal were not enough.
The ending is the cleverest part. After the violent wish in the fourth stanza ("Be utterly and helplessly consumed by it"), the poem drops into a two-line coda: "To feel what it feels like, / To never be loved." The speaker's revenge is not a wish for pain in general but for one specific pain. This connects to the earlier line "Was told that you were loved, / So remind me what love is." The speaker was told they were loved, yet ends up feeling never loved, and this is exactly the feeling they want to pass on. The revenge fantasy exposes the speaker's own wound. There is no apology and no softening, and the poem simply stops on the word "loved."
What makes the poem worth reading is that it does not try to be wise. Many poems about loss move toward acceptance, but this one stays in the stage most of us would prefer to skip, where hurt has turned bitter and the speaker is not yet ready to forgive. By admitting to an ugly wish, the poem gets closer to how heartbreak really feels, and the question in its title is never settled.