Four lines, no title, no punctuation: amone's poem is marked only by a row of asterisks, as if the feeling were too raw to name. Nothing in the text tells us anything about who the speaker is beyond what they say, so the words have to carry everything. What they say is blunt. The speaker is depressed, the one person who could ease it has moved on, and the speaker now sees themselves as a leftover.
The first line opens with a clinical, almost medical word, "depression", and then gives it fists: it is "hitting me hard." The illness is not a mood or a shadow but something that attacks, and "these days" suggests it has been going on for a while. The second line puts the cure in another person's hands: "only you could take away the pain." Two words matter here. "Only" makes the beloved the single possible remedy, and "could" is quietly tragic, because it hovers between ability and loss. The pain is spoken of as a thing that can be lifted off, like a weight or a bandage, but only by one pair of hands.
The turn comes with "But now you're with another." It is the shortest line in the poem, about seven syllables against the eleven or so of the lines around it, and the shortness works like a flinch. The rival is never named or described. "Another" is simply a gap where a person should be, and the speaker cannot or will not fill it in.
The last line then picks the same word up and changes it: "I'm just another second hand lover." In line three, "another" meant one specific person. Now it means a type, one more in a long line of people who have been used and passed along. The small word "just" shrinks the speaker further. "Second hand" is the poem's sharpest image, borrowed from the language of shops and charity stalls. It turns a lover into an object that has already belonged to someone else and is now worth less. The phrase can be read more than one way. The speaker may feel like a cast-off, discarded by the beloved, or like someone who only ever gets what others have finished with. The poem doesn't settle this, and the ambiguity makes the self-description feel more painful. The speaker is not sure what they are, only that they are not first.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no regular meter, and the lines read like speech, or like something typed quickly and left unedited. The first two lines are only loosely linked, "days" and "pain" sharing a long *a* sound rather than a true rhyme. In the last two lines, "another" and "lover" share their unstressed ending and their rhythm, but the middle consonants differ. It is a near-rhyme, close enough to satisfy the ear and not quite close enough to feel resolved. That suits a poem about almost having what you need. The final line also piles up stresses with "second hand", two heavy beats side by side, so the poem ends on a thud instead of a flourish.
The poem's significance lies in how much it fits into so little space. It links two kinds of suffering, mental illness and heartbreak, without explaining which came first. We can't tell whether the breakup deepened the depression or whether the depression was already there and the lover was the only relief. The speaker has made one person responsible for their wellbeing, and the poem quietly shows how fragile that arrangement is. The "you" never speaks and the rival never appears, so the speaker is left alone with the pain, which is exactly the condition the poem describes.
Part of its strength is its refusal to dress things up. There is no elaborate metaphor, only a handful of everyday phrases, "hitting me hard," "take away," "second hand," arranged so that each one lands. For a reader, the effect is the uncomfortable honesty of overhearing something said too plainly to be performed.