Seeing someone you are trying to get over takes a second. Getting over the sight of them takes much longer. Alex Mclean's poem lives inside that second. In eight lines, a speaker runs into a person from the past ("I saw you again"), wins a small private battle, and then admits how little the win is worth. The central idea is the gap between what we decide and what we feel. You can refuse your feelings entry and still be standing at the door, wanting them.
The poem begins in a flat, almost reportorial voice, as if it plans to give a calm account. Then comes "Holy shit," and the composure is gone before the sentence is. Look at the punctuation. The only full stops before the end land on the two most defensive utterances, "Holy shit." and "Not this time." Everything else is strung together with commas, so the voice never gets to rest. The speaker sounds like someone talking fast to stay upright.
The most striking image is in the third line: "The feelings tried to crawl back." Feelings here are creatures, and "crawl" is a telling verb. It suggests something low, slow and stubborn, something that has been thrown out and drags itself back anyway. The speaker plays gatekeeper ("I didn't let them"), and "Not this time" hints that earlier encounters ended differently. That is an inference from the text, but the phrase would make little sense otherwise. The resolve is delivered as a curt fragment, a door slammed rather than a speech.
Then the poem turns on "But damn was it hard," and the control starts to leak. "Damn how much I wanna love you, / Damn how much I wanna hold you" repeats its opening word like a pulse. The grammar is unfinished, since the lines are exclamations with no "it is" to complete them, so the feeling seems to tumble out faster than the sentence can be built. Note the small climb from "love" to "hold," from an abstract feeling to a physical gesture. The ache is in the body as much as the mind. The informal "wanna" keeps everything at the level of spoken, almost texted, honesty. There is also a quiet paradox. The speaker says they did not let the feelings back, yet these two lines are the feelings coming back. The resistance happens in the world, but the confession happens on the page.
The last line is the longest in the poem, and it closes the door again: "But that can't happen, it won't, and I know it never will." Its three clauses climb like a staircase. "Can't" is impossibility, "won't" is a fact about the future, and "never will" is permanence. The second "But" of the poem works as a mirror of the first. The first turned resolve into longing, and this one turns longing into resignation, so the poem swings like a pendulum. Line lengths show the same pattern. The sentences of control, the third line and the last, are the longest, while the middle is made of short, repeating bursts of want. There is no rhyme to tie things off and no comforting final image. The ending is a verdict, not a cure.
The title is the most puzzling part, and its form is part of the point. «l o o k s D e c I e v e» spaces out the letters, which slows the eye as if the words were being stared at. The spelling "Decieve" differs from the standard form. The capital "I" sits right in the middle of the word, and one possible reading is that the speaker's own "I" is caught in the deception. The poem never says whose looks deceive. It could be the other person's appearance, which still pulls so strongly. It could also be the speaker's outward calm, which hides the damage. Since the poem starts with "I saw you," sight is clearly where the trouble begins.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to dress up a familiar moment. The swearing reads as accuracy, not shock, and the poem allows self-control and heartbreak to exist at the same time. Holding the line against a feeling is a real achievement, the poem says, but it is not the same as the feeling being gone. Many readers will have stood in that gap between knowing and wanting, and this poem gives it a voice in eight short lines.