The speaker recounts a night with a new boyfriend: getting high, listening to Cat Stevens, and kissing him without feeling anything. She tells him she should stop seeing him because she's "too fucked up," and his reply, that her mistakes are "so cute," shows he isn't really listening to her. The casual, slangy voice reads like a diary entry or a blurted confession, jumping from detail to detail.
Underneath the jokes and drug haze, the speaker is lonely and frustrated. She claims "these guys don't love me" and wants either to be left alone or to be kissed "really new." Afterward she lies in bed crying, then wakes with a headache, leftover eyelashes, and blood on her pants. Her sarcastic remark about the "magic carpet ride" punctures the dreamy mood the night began with. The poem ends on a plain, blunt line: "I want real love." The mood moves from woozy and detached to tired, bitter, and quietly honest.