Time is the word that frames Brittany Allen's untitled poem, which is marked only by asterisks, and it is also what the speaker feels cheated of. The first line remembers a lover saying they want "more time." The last line wonders whether they ever meant it. Between those two points, the poem moves from tender memory to uneasy waiting. Its central idea is that devotion can turn into a form of paralysis. The speaker keeps faith with someone who keeps leaving, and slowly starts to question what that faith is worth.
The poem plays with time in a way that rewards a slow reading. When the two are together, "we have nothing but time," as if the hours were endless. Yet that time "passes too fast," and once the lover is gone, the days "turn to weeks" just as swiftly. Time seems both plentiful and stolen, and the lover's request for "more" of it begins to sound like a promise with nothing behind it. The sharpest moment comes in the short pair of lines "Blink and you might miss something, / I blink and I miss you." The first is a familiar saying about how fast life moves. The second turns it inward, and "miss" shifts from *fail to notice* to *long for*. One small word carries the whole emotional distance of the poem.
The main image is the sea. The lover "wander[s] and change[s] like the tides," and the speaker reasons from nature: whatever else the sea does, "it will always come back to the shore." The comparison is comforting, but it also shows how the speaker sees the relationship. The shore does nothing. It waits "for your water to grace me," and the word "grace" makes the returning tide feel like a gift from something higher and more powerful. Tides, too, follow forces of their own and do not answer to the coast. The speaker does not say this outright, but the metaphor quietly admits that she has no say in when, or whether, the lover returns. She says as much herself: "I cannot call out to you and ask your return."
The poem is in free verse, with no regular rhyme and no steady metre. Many lines are long and run on in a plain, spoken way, like someone talking themselves through a thought. That suits the subject, because the waiting is stretched out and so are the sentences. The short lines hit harder because of it. "They're difficult" stands alone after the vague "times are different now," and the poem never explains what has changed. "It isn't like that anymore" is just as closed off. The speaker gives the feeling and withholds the reason, which makes the silence around the lover feel heavier. The repeated "time" and the echoing "miss" work in place of rhyme, tying the lines together by sound and meaning.
The self-description in line twelve is worth attention: "never moving, never changing." It sets the speaker against the lover who "wander[s] and change[s]," and it can be read as both loyalty and stagnation. A shore can seem fixed, but this one is lonely, passive, and defined entirely by what it is waiting for. So the closing question, "I wonder if I am that shore after all?", is where the poem turns. Perhaps the metaphor has stopped working because the tide no longer comes in. Or perhaps the speaker is starting to doubt whether she can keep playing a part that asks her to stay still forever.
The last line brings back "more time" but changes its weight. In the first line the phrase was a caress, and by the end it is a sentence to be re-examined and possibly doubted. The poem has no final punctuation and no resolution, so it simply trails off the way a thought does at the end of a long wait.
Part of the poem's appeal lies in its plain language and familiar metaphor. It does not try to dazzle. It takes an old comparison, the lover as the sea, and tests it against the experience of waiting until the comparison starts to crack. That honesty about uncertainty, and the way it ends on a question rather than a consolation, makes it feel true to anyone who has waited for someone and wondered whether the waiting was one-sided.