Most of us picture last words as something finished: a line spoken at the right moment, with the right weight. Abbie's "Last words" takes that picture apart in its first clause. "I never had my last words," the speaker says, and the verb is worth pausing on. Last words are treated as something one has, almost a possession or a right, and the speaker reports that it was never handed over. What follows is not the speech that was denied but an account of why it never happened.
That account is built from one phrase repeated three times: "in the middle of." The poem is a single long sentence joined by commas rather than full stops, and the choice matters. A comma never lets the voice come to rest, so the reader moves through the lines in one breath, the way people talk when they are trying to get everything out before being stopped. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the repetition makes its own beat: "in the middle of sentence, in the middle of text, in the middle of composing." The pattern is a stubborn, stumbling insistence, and the poem needs nothing more.
The three "middles" are not the same size, though. First comes a sentence, then a text, then "composing my thoughts." The movement runs inward and backward. A sentence is already made of words, and a text is words meant for someone. But composing thoughts is the stage before any words exist, so by the third repetition the speaker has been cut off not mid-speech but mid-thinking. What was lost grows with each line: first the statement, then the message, finally the process of deciding what to say. "Composing" is a telling word, borrowed from music and writing, and it suggests care and revision. Someone composing their thoughts is trying to get them right, and that effort makes the interruption feel crueller.
"Text" is an interesting choice too. It could mean writing in general, but it also strongly suggests a message on a phone, an unsent draft with the cursor still blinking. If that is the picture, the poem sets the old idea of deathbed words in a modern world, where a final communication might be half-typed rather than whispered. That reading is an inference, since the poem never says who the speaker is or what stopped them. It leaves open whether the interruption is death or some other sudden end. "Last" and the past tense of "never had" lean toward finality, but the poem holds back from spelling it out, and the restraint adds to its force.
Then there is the grammar. "In the middle of sentence" lacks the "a" we would expect. Whether it is deliberate or simply how the line came out, the missing word gives the phrase a hurried, raw quality, as if the poem's own syntax has been caught mid-gesture. It suits the subject. Nothing here has been polished into a tidy farewell.
The ending is where the poem does its cleverest work. The final infinitive, "to say...", hangs on an ellipsis and never receives its object. We expect the content of the last words, and the page gives us three dots. The silence becomes the last word. There is a paradox in a poem titled "Last words" that insists it contains none, and yet the poem is itself made of words. It is what the speaker manages to say instead: not the intended message, but the record of its absence.
This is what makes the poem matter. It refuses the comfort of a neat ending and offers something closer to how most lives actually go, interrupted rather than concluded. It also turns the question on the reader, who is left wondering what they are in the middle of right now, and who is waiting to hear it. With one repeated phrase and a trailing ellipsis, Abbie makes incompleteness both the subject and the form.