Five short lines, and the speaker has already done the maths. Every moment spent weighing up a choice is taken from a limited supply, and whatever is left must be spent living with the result. In "Decisions," the poet who signs as Call me Mez turns the familiar fear of choosing badly into a fear about time itself. Waiting is not a safe place to stand, because the clock keeps running while you hesitate.
The vocabulary of the first stanza is quietly financial. Time is something you "spend," and "every second" leaves no moment free of cost. "Second" is repeated, first as the unit being spent and then in "a second less," so the poem seems to tick as it goes. The word also can't help suggesting "second thoughts" and second-guessing, the very habit the speaker is describing. "Debating" is a grand word, borrowed from parliaments and courtrooms, and it makes the speaker sound like a whole chamber arguing with itself. Yet it is followed by the slightly slack "about," which makes the debate feel circular and a little wordy, as such arguments are. The choice itself is just "a choice." We never learn what it is, and that blankness lets it stand for anything from a career to a lunch order.
The poem's best move is its stanza break. "Is a second less to live" is a complete thought and, read alone, a sharp one about mortality: each second of dithering is a second off your life. Then the white space opens, and the sentence resumes with "with the consequences." Suddenly "live" belongs to the idiom "live with," meaning to endure. The word does two jobs at once, first life and then endurance, and the reader has to turn the corner the way the speaker is stuck at a turning. The gap on the page also works as a hesitation, so the reader pauses where the speaker would.
The final line is the shortest, only four syllables, and nearly all of it is single-syllable words. "Chose wrong" puts two stressed beats side by side, so the poem ends with a thud rather than a cadence. The tense is worth noticing too. The speaker is "debating," in the present, but speaks of having "chose[n]" in the past, as though already standing in the aftermath and looking back. The "if" keeps the error hypothetical, yet the dread has arrived early. The speaker pays for the mistake in advance, which is exactly the waste the poem complains about.
There is also a puzzle here, and it is part of what makes the poem interesting. Read coldly, the logic wobbles: if the choice is wrong, fewer seconds to live with the consequences might sound like a mercy. Judging by the first stanza's urgency, the poem seems to mean something else, that the time lost to deliberation is time lost for living through a mistake, learning from it and putting it right. But it never says so. That gap lets the poem be read as sincere anxiety, as a dry joke at the speaker's own expense, or as both.
The form suits this unsettled tone. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only lines of about five or six syllables that shrink to four. Rhyme would have given the speaker a tidiness they clearly lack, and the plain, uneven lines sound like a thought caught mid-worry. Nothing is decorated. There is no metaphor beyond the buried one of time as money, so the idea has nowhere to hide.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much argument it fits into so small a space: a premise, a twist in meaning and a conditional that leaves the question open. It offers no advice and no moral, and it does not tell you to decide faster. It simply makes the cost of delay visible. By the time you have finished thinking about it, you have spent a few more seconds, which is the poem's point.