An epitaph normally lets the living speak about the dead, and Alex mclean's "r.i.p" starts in exactly that mould: "Here lies someone who we once loved dearly." The formula sounds solemn and a little stiff, and the poem keeps up the pretence for a dozen lines, describing a girl who was "too kind and bubbly for us to handle." Only at "So.. r.i.p to the old me" does the trick land. The person being buried is the speaker's own earlier self, and the "we" and "they" of the opening are the people who wore her down. The poem is about a quieter loss than death: becoming guarded, and grieving the warmth that was lost along the way.
The imagery runs on light and temperature. "She gave light to the world and people would dim it" is a precise image, since dimming is something done on purpose, like turning down a lamp. Once the light has gone, the vocabulary cools. "As she grew older she grew colder" is the poem's one clear rhyme, and the two words differ by a single consonant, which suits a change that happens bit by bit. The "cold glare" follows, and then the damning word "stale", which the people use for her. Stale suggests something left out too long, and the speaker reports it without arguing.
The poem is sharpest on the double bind. First the people "hated" her "cheeriness" and wondered whether "it was all an act." That is a cruel suspicion to aim at someone kind, because it makes sincerity itself look fake. Later the same people "missed her" and complained that she was "closed off." She is condemned for giving too much and then for giving too little. Her reply is a glare that "said more than she bothered to voice," so the poem shows her giving up on explanation well before the speaker puts the story into words.
Money language runs underneath. She was "trying to give others what was hers," and "in return all she got" was damage. Kindness becomes a bad trade in which she handed over something of her own and received nothing back. "A broken soul and a lost mind" is the bluntest phrase in the poem and perhaps the most conventional, but its bluntness fits a speaker who has stopped decorating her feelings.
The form supports that plainness. There is no regular metre and no rhyme scheme, and the lines vary from the long, explaining "Trying to give others what was hers" to the clipped "They hated it,". It reads like speech, or like a message typed late at night. The lowercase title, the guillemets around it, the contraction "'cause," the lowercase "i'll" and the double dot in "So.." all push the register away from formal elegy. That double dot works like a breath before a confession, and the pronoun shift from "she" to "me" is the one moment where the mask drops.
The last line is the best. After the bleak summary, the poem ends small and affectionate: "And oh how i'll miss her cheesy jokes." "Cheesy" is a loving word, and a joke is a very specific thing to mourn. The grief is not for some grand virtue but for silliness, for the ease of being a person who could make a bad pun without fear. The line also hints that the speaker is not as cold as the "stale" label suggests, since a warm, slightly self-mocking voice is still the one delivering the eulogy.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It takes a common experience, being changed by how others react to you, and turns it into a funeral with the mourner and the dead person as the same self. It also holds two attitudes at once. The speaker calls the old self "too kind and naive," which sounds like self-blame, yet the evidence the poem gives points at the people who dimmed her. The reader is left to decide who really deserves the blame, and that unresolved tension is where the poem's feeling comes from.