Three lies, three promises: the poem opens like a ledger. Friday, Saturday and Sunday each get a lie, then Wednesday, Thursday and "every day that ends in 'y'" each get a promise. That makes six entries, which may be what the title "Six figures" points to, a tally of broken faith. The phrase also sounds like money, which could hint at a debt being counted, though that is only an inference. The days are out of order, and Monday and Tuesday are skipped until the joking line sweeps in every day at once. The speaker is describing something constant, not occasional.
That line also sets up the poem's first turn. "Ends in 'y'" leads straight to "Why?", so a letter becomes a question. Just before it, "Right before the dusk or dawn?" sits oddly between the lies and the promises, like an aside. The speaker wonders when exactly the lies are told, and the answer is at the edges of the day, where the light is uncertain.
The central idea is what repeated dishonesty does to the person on the receiving end. The speaker moves from confusion to self-blame, then sarcasm, and finally numbness. The self-blame escalates in a single stanza, from "Maybe it's my fault" to "Oh, it's definitely my fault." That "Oh" changes the tone. The speaker now sounds like someone who has learned to take the blame and is mocking that habit. Even empathy gets turned against its owner, as "faulty empathy," a defect to be apologised for.
The poem's best move comes next: "Now I bask in apathy / Or does it bask in me?" Basking suggests warmth and comfort, so the numbness seems at first like a refuge the speaker has chosen. Then the grammar flips. Apathy becomes the one doing the basking, something that has settled on the speaker and is feeding off them. Even the words are close, since "empathy" turns into "apathy" with a small change in the middle. A feeling is not so much destroyed as slightly rewritten.
The silence in the relationship is handled just as carefully. "You don't answer," the speaker says, then admits, "I never spoke the question out loud." The conversation is one-sided on both ends, which complicates the blame. Later the speaker says the questions "have answers I don't seek," then asks the bluntest one anyway: "What do you think you mean to me?" The reply, "Nothing? / Nothing.", could be the other person's answer or the speaker testing the word aloud. Either way, the question mark softens into a full stop, and these are the shortest lines in the poem. "Silly me, I'm so disrespectful" follows as bitter irony, as if asking for honesty were a breach of manners.
The form follows the same movement. For most of the poem the lines are short and uneven, with no steady metre, so it reads like thought spilling out in real time. Rhyme appears in patches: "loud" and "allowed," then "empathy," "apathy" and "me." In the last stanza it tightens, with "sleep" and "keep" closing the pattern and "me" and "apathy" sitting inside it. As the speaker settles into numbness, the poem settles into rhyme, as though it too has stopped struggling.
The final image is the most unsettling. Apathy is "wrapped around the promises," like gift wrap on empty boxes or a bandage over something unhealed. The tenses matter here: "I cried myself to sleep" is past, and "now it's only apathy" is present. The word "only" suggests less pain, but what the speaker has gained is a colder state, not relief. Even the last line is gentle. The promises "never *seem* to keep," and that small hedge shows the speaker still giving the other person the benefit of the doubt.
The poem's significance lies in its plainness. It uses everyday language, a pun and a few repeated words to follow a feeling as it changes, from questioning to blame to numbness. It suggests that indifference can be a wound's later form, not its opposite.