The title says "my life," and the first line finishes the sentence for it: "Was rough." It is the only line in the poem without an "I," as if life itself has to be named before the speaker can step in. "Rough" is a small, almost shrugging word, and everything after it shows how much it is covering for. That gap between the mild word and the weight behind it sets the poem's tone. The speaker does not dramatize. She states.
The poem is built almost entirely on repetition. "I was" opens line after line, and the effect is cumulative, like a record being read out. There is no rhyme, no regular rhythm and no punctuation. Most lines are short, flat statements that stop where the thought stops. Because they are so uniform, "I was teased" and "I was raped" sit at the same length and in the same grammatical frame. The poem does not rank its pain. The reader supplies the difference in weight, and that makes the lines land harder than any added commentary would.
The grammar matters too. Early on, most of the verbs are passive: teased, made fun of, left out, abused, handcuffed. Things are done to the speaker, and she is the object of other people's actions. Even "I was pregnant" is a state she is placed in, not something she chose. "I was trouble in school" is a different kind of sentence. It is a label, the way others saw her, and it hints at how a person under pressure can be turned into a problem. The pairing "I was handcuffed a few times / I was never arrested" is the most unsettling. The second line cancels the first, but the handcuffs stay in the mind.
There is almost no figurative language here. The poem has no metaphors and no scenery, and its images are bare facts: a special needs school, fights "everyday," handcuffs. The vagueness is telling. "Abused by alot of men," "lost alot of loved ones" and "I had alot going on" all lean on the same loose word. The speaker doesn't count or itemize, and that suggests a pile too large and too tangled to sort. The nonstandard spelling and plain vocabulary add to the sense of direct, unpolished speech. The word "never" also keeps returning: never arrested, never had any friends, mom never loved me, never strong, never knew. The poem is full of absences, such as friends, safety and reassurance.
The turn comes at "I thought my mom never loved me." The verbs shift from what happened to what she believed, and the poem moves from outside events to inner conclusions. "I thought" is in the past tense. That suggests, though the text never says so, a speaker looking back at those beliefs from a little distance. The line "I thought I wouldn't last in life" is quietly striking in that light, since the poem itself is evidence of something lasting long enough to be written down.
The final line is "I never knew life is so serious." After everything listed, "serious" is a strangely mild word, almost a schoolroom word, and it echoes the understatement of "rough" at the start. But the verb tense changes. "Knew" is past, while "is" is present. Life is serious now, and the poem ends there without a lesson, a consolation or a promise that things improved. That refusal is honest. A neat resolution would have contradicted everything the list had built.
What makes the poem significant is that it trusts bare testimony. It does not ask to be admired for its craft, and it does not decorate its subject to make it easier to read. It names experiences that are often hidden or softened and lets them stand in a row. Part of its force is that the reader has to stay with each line, with no metaphor to retreat into. Its title also claims the whole life, and the poem is brief and plain enough that the claim feels earned. It is a piece of writing that treats saying what happened as enough.