Most love poems speak to the beloved. This one keeps glancing over its shoulder at everyone else. It opens with three short commands, "hate me, / love me, / do what you want with me", all ending on the same word. The speaker sounds like someone who has stopped bargaining for approval, yet the rest of the poem shows how much that approval still costs.
The poem is about a speaker in love with a girl ("she puts her hand on my shoulder / and my heart flutters") who lives among people who disapprove. The objection is never named, but the clues are strong: feelings that made someone "feel threatened", the belief that "i deserve to die", and the prediction that "everyone else will bash us and condemn". Judging by this language, the hostility is aimed at the relationship itself, at whom the speaker loves. The speaker wants to flee but is careful about the blame: "it is not the town itself, / but the people". That correction suggests the speaker still has some attachment to home, and a wish to be fair to it.
The central idea sits in the title, "envy". Told again and again that their feelings are dangerous, the speaker reverses the charge: "i think their hatred is fuelled by jealousy". The "i think" matters. It reads less like a proven fact than like a conclusion reached in order to survive. The poem then turns it into a boast: "my love for you is stronger than anyone's love for them". Hatred is recast as a kind of poverty, the resentment of people whose own love is weaker.
The form carries this uncertainty. The poem is free verse with no punctuation and a lowercase "i", so it reads like one long thought that never stops to be tidied. Line lengths swing wildly. "she puts her hand on my shoulder" is a quiet moment of touch, while "it is when i'm reminded that other people think i deserve to die" stretches out until the line itself feels weighed down. Rhyme comes in bursts rather than a pattern: me / me / me / flee, then die / sigh, sun / one, beliefs / brief, them / condemn. It tends to cluster where feeling is strongest. The chiming can sound almost sing-song, which sits strangely beside the subject. One reading is that the speaker presses a frightening subject into a shape that can be managed.
The syntax is telling too. "It is when i'm reminded... do i look at her and let out a sigh" twists its word order, and it joins two feelings. The sigh is not simple adoration. It comes at the moment the reminder of hatred lands, so tenderness and fear arrive in the same breath.
The imagery is plain on purpose. She is "more beautiful than the sun" and could "easily win number one", a stock comparison followed by something close to a playground ranking. The praise is ordinary because the love is ordinary. What is extraordinary is the hostility it provokes. Time is squeezed as well: other people's beliefs "make our fleeting moments brief", so moments that were already short are cut shorter, and the near-rhyme of "beliefs" and "brief" ties the two together. The line "i'm so deeply apologetic that my own feelings made you feel threatened" works as bitter irony. Its polite, formal wording hides sarcasm, because the speaker is being made to apologise for simply having feelings.
The pronouns also shift. The poem begins with "me" three times, alone before the town's verdict, and ends with "us". Even so, it does not finish on triumph. After the boast, the last word is "condemn", so the threat still gets the final note.
The poem matters because it holds two things together without choosing between them: the private pleasure of a hand on the shoulder and the public pressure that follows it everywhere. It neither collapses into despair nor floats off into pure defiance. Its unpolished rhymes and loose punctuation make the feelings seem unedited. For a reader in school, it shows that a poem does not need elaborate metaphor to be powerful. A direct voice, a few carefully placed words, and the choice to call hatred "envy" can be enough.