Love in "What Is Love" is almost always something missing. Adain Michael gives the poem a question for a title, then answers it only in negatives: "You never loved me," "No one loves me," "Nit even my mother." What the speaker offers is a definition by absence, in which love is measured by what is left behind: a cold room, broken glass, a stained carpet.
The first stanza builds its scene in short, bare lines. "A room so cold / All alone / In the silent dark" strips the world down to temperature, loneliness and silence, and the silence is what makes the next line frightening: "Is when the screaming starts." Nobody else is in the room, so the screaming seems to be internal, a noise that only the dark lets in. The most striking image is the carpet, "stained / Not with pink / Not with yellow / Its scarlet just like the glass." Pink and yellow are soft, ordinary, almost nursery colours, and the speaker lists them only to rule them out. Then the poem arrives at "scarlet," and the comparison to the glass blurs the picture so that the reader has to supply what the speaker will not quite say. The poem is circling something rather than announcing it, and the restraint is more unsettling than a direct description would be. The speaker's calm prediction, "I know my life won't last / For very long," even rhymes with "glass," one of the few moments where the poem's sounds click together. The rhyme is brief and bleak, and it fits.
Otherwise the poem is free verse with no regular rhythm. Most lines run to three to six words, as if the speaker is speaking in gasps. The anger comes in the same clipped way: "So fuck you / Fuck yourself." These lines are blunt and have no polish, and they sound like someone who has run out of patience with being polite. Then the poem does something unexpected. After the insults, the speaker says "You lost me, i know it's not much," and the hedging begins: "But maybe, just maybe / I loved you." The accusation that the other person never loved them gives way to a small, shaky admission of their own love. "Not much" shows how low they rate themselves, and "maybe, just maybe" shows how little they trust their own feelings. Even the tense is telling: "loved," in the past, as if the feeling has already been written off.
The second stanza steps back from the "you" of the first and starts to generalise, with a line that sounds almost like the opening of a school essay: "The worst feeling in the world / Is the feeling of not being loved." The repeated "Or" in "a parrent / Or a partner / Or a friend" widens the loss, one relationship at a time, until nobody is left. The mother's words are the heaviest part. "She told me I'm stupid / I'm worthess / I'm not worth her time" has no quotation marks, so her voice slides into the speaker's own, and it is hard to tell where her judgement ends and the speaker's self-image begins. That blending seems to be the point. Words that a parent says can end up as the way a child describes themselves. The flat line "Being homless sucked" has a deliberately casual tone, and the tone makes the hardship sound worn and familiar. Then "no body loved me" splits one word into two, and whether by accident or not, it echoes the body of the first stanza, the hand holding the glass.
The punctuation is also telling. Almost nothing in the poem is punctuated, and the only question mark comes in the final line: "So what's the point of life?" The poem has gone through anger and a moment of tenderness only to stop at a question it cannot answer. The misspellings ("weather," "parrent," "worthess") and the missing apostrophes give the poem the feel of something written fast and unedited, a draft that was never tidied up, which adds to its sense of raw honesty.
What gives the poem its significance is that it names a link many readers will recognise: feeling unloved at home, then carrying that feeling into every other relationship. It does not offer comfort or a resolution, and it does not pretend to. Because it deals with self-harm and hopelessness, it is worth reading with care, and if any of it feels close to home, talking to a trusted adult, a teacher or a counsellor is a good next step. The poem answers its own title with a question, and it leaves the reader to notice who ought to have been there to answer it.