Adain Michael's "Monkey See Monkey Do" is a short poem about how suffering can pass from one person to another. A speaker watches someone close to them self-harm, is told to leave, and obeys. Soon afterwards the other person attempts suicide, and the speaker, sad in the same way, does "the same." The poem ends with both of them found. Its central idea is contagion: pain here is not only felt but copied, and the poem asks what happens when two people in distress have only each other to learn from.
The title is the first surprise. "Monkey see, monkey do" is a playground saying, the kind of thing said to a child who mimics a sibling. Set above a poem about self-harm, it sounds almost cruelly light, and that gap is the point. The speaker is reaching for the simplest explanation available: I saw it, so I did it. The phrase also hints at how young or unguarded the speaker's understanding is. Nothing in the poem is analysed or explained away. It is simply reported.
That reporting style shapes everything. There is no rhyme, no regular rhythm and no punctuation, so the lines arrive one after another like a statement given in a single breath. There are almost no metaphors. The only two images are brutally literal and built in the same way: "Blade to skin" and "A nuse around my neck." (The spelling, which looks like a slip for "noose," gives the line a raw, unpolished feel, as though it was written quickly and left unrevised.) Each is a fragment with no verb, an object placed against a body. The echo links the two scenes, and the speaker's act becomes a mirror of the one witnessed.
The line lengths do careful work. Most lines are three to six words, clipped and almost hesitant. Then comes the longest line in the poem: "Not long after that he had attempted to kill himself." It reads like prose, flat and procedural. The heaviest fact is delivered in the least decorated way, and the past-perfect "had attempted" gives the speaker a slight distance, as if describing something they are still holding at arm's length. Right after it the lines shrink again: "Because he was sad / So was I / I did the same." This is almost a chain of logic, but the logic is terrifyingly simple. Sadness is the cause, sameness is the result, and nothing in between slows it down.
The small word "So" matters. Early on, "So I did" marks obedience: he says leave, and the speaker leaves. Two lines later, "So was I" marks shared feeling. The same word that carried compliance now carries identification, and the reader can feel one lead to the other. Being sent away is not shown as the cause of what follows, but the poem lets the two moments sit close together, and the speaker's guilt, unspoken, seems to hover between them.
The ending is the most open part. "But I was found / By my mother / Just as he was." That "But" turns the poem toward rescue, and "found" is a gentle word, as if the speaker had been lost rather than hurt. "Just as he was" can be read two ways. It may mean he too was found, perhaps by someone close to him, so that even the discovery is repeated. Or it may mean he was found in exactly the same state. Either way the poem closes on a final echo rather than a resolution, and it offers no lesson or comfort. The mirroring that began with the title is complete.
What makes the poem significant is its honesty and restraint. It does not dramatise or romanticise. It shows how quickly one person's crisis can become another's, and how much sits unsaid behind "leave him alone." It also leaves a quiet question for readers: what might have happened if the speaker had not gone? Read carefully, the poem is a reminder of why telling a trusted adult matters, and why being found, however painful, is better than being alone.