Four lines, no rhyme, and a title that sounds like something muttered under the breath: Alex McLean's "I swear its too much" doesn't dress up its feelings. The missing apostrophe in "its" and the casual "I swear" make it read like a message typed in a hurry rather than a polished piece, though that is an impression from the text, not a fact I can vouch for. Either way, the informality does real work. Nobody is performing here. Someone is trying to get something said.
What gets said is a split. The first line puts two selves side by side: "I'm smiling during the day but during certain periods it all just consumes me." The repeated "during" packs the daytime smile and the private collapse into one sentence, and the "but" between them is where the poem turns. The smile is real enough to mention, yet it works like a surface. Notice how little the speaker explains. "It all" is never defined, and we learn only what "it" does. That vagueness feels honest, as if the feeling were bigger than any single cause. "Consumes" is a hungry, fire-like verb, suggesting something that eats a person from the inside rather than merely upsetting them. Yet the line plays it down with "just," as though the speaker were shrugging while describing being devoured. "Certain periods" sounds oddly clinical, almost like a calendar entry, and hints at episodes that return on their own schedule.
Then come the images. "It's like i'm floating in space" gives us weightlessness, silence and distance from everyone. Floating is passive, with nothing to push against. Line three reverses it: "raging and trapped in a cage." Now the speaker is violently active and completely immobilised. Those states shouldn't coexist, and the clash is the point, since all that energy has nowhere to go. Space is endless and a cage is the opposite of endless. Putting them in one picture creates a paradox of being lost in infinity and squeezed into almost nothing, which suggests that isolation and confinement can be a single feeling.
The sound quietly backs this up. "Space," "raging" and "cage" share the same long *a* vowel, and "raging" and "cage" even share their closing sound, so the two images echo each other as if one place were being described twice. There is no steady metre, and the lines follow the pace of plain speech. But their lengths are telling. The opening line sprawls across fourteen words, then the poem tightens into short lines of six, six and eight. Like the cage, it closes in as it goes. Line three also ends without punctuation, and the capital "That's" at the start of line four carries the thought straight on, so the reader gets no pause to recover. Even the small slip from "I'm" in line one to lowercase "i'm" in line two could be read, generously and as a guess, as the self shrinking once the poem moves from the daytime world into the cage.
The last line holds the sharpest detail: a cage "only big enough for me to stand." Not to lie down, pace or stretch. It fits the speaker exactly, as though made to measure. And "stand" cuts two ways. It can mean the bare minimum, the one position allowed, but it can also mean endurance, the quiet fact of still being upright. The poem stops on that word and offers no escape and no comfort, so the reader has to hold both meanings at once.
That is where its significance lies. In barely three dozen words, it speaks about the gap between the face shown in daylight and what goes on underneath, something many people carry without saying. It names no diagnosis and promises no cure. It offers an image exact enough that a reader might recognise their own experience in it. The poem's plainness, with its shrugging "just" and its unexplained "it," makes the cage easier to believe in.