Three short lines open the poem like a medical report: the heart bleeds, the body longs, the mind yearns. Each has the same plain shape, and each names a different part of the self in pain. Nothing is explained yet. The flat, repetitive grammar makes the ache sound less like a passing mood than a standing condition.
The lines that follow tell a story, but only in outline. The speaker remembers the lover's "deep and intense" eyes and "innocent and kind" smile, and says the two "found comfort in each other's loneliness." Then comes the verdict, before any evidence: "we didn't stand a chance." The most inventive image arrives next: "Our love ran deep / But our roots were too easily pulled apart." The language slides from water ("ran deep") into soil, and the paradox is the point. Roots that go deep should hold, yet these gave way at a tug. The word "deep" has also already been used for the lover's eyes, so depth becomes the speaker's measure for everything about this person, even as the circumstances prove shallow and fragile.
Then the voice turns almost casual. "I can count on one hand the amount of times we saw each other" sprawls across the page in an everyday, spoken phrasing, nothing like the clipped opening. The next line drops a single word, "forbidden," and does not explain it. The poem never says who or what forbade these meetings, and it never says how the lover was "gone," only that it happened "suddenly," with an ellipsis that trails into silence. Judging by the text, the speaker cares less about the reason than about the absence it left.
The second half is built on time and distance: "too long," then "many years," then "last night." The only concrete scene is of eyes meeting "across the room," so even the memory is of someone at a distance. A dream breaks the long silence, and the speaker's bewildered "What does this mean?" is the one moment of open questioning. The wish that follows, "so I could reach out and touch you," quietly answers the opening triad. The body wants touch, the mind "won't let you go," and the heart is left for the end.
Before that comes the poem's only plea: "Please help Oh Lord," with the comma left hanging. The speaker's own mind cannot end the longing, so the appeal goes outward. The final lines then repeat the opening, "For my heart bleeds," but the added "For" turns the statement into an explanation. The poem has been circling toward the cause of its first line.
The cause is the last line's surprise: "For a lover I never knew." After "our love ran deep" and the comfort they shared, this seems to contradict everything before it. One reading, which is an inference from the text, is that the contradiction is the whole poem. With so few meetings, the speaker never fully knew this person, and what hurts is the future the two "looked to," the unlived part of the relationship. That would explain why "We had our pasts / But we looked to the future" matters so much. The loss is not of a shared history but of a history that never got the chance to begin.
There is no rhyme and no steady meter. This is free verse that follows speech and feeling, with short lines for pain and longer ones for halting recollection. Punctuation is sparse. Dashes and the ellipsis appear only at moments of emphasis or breakdown. The title, a row of asterisks in place of words, suggests an untitled piece, which suits a poem that feels like a private page rather than a polished set piece.
What gives the poem its force is its honesty about scale. It does not claim a long marriage or a shared lifetime. It claims that a handful of meetings, a few details of a face, and one dream can still keep a heart bleeding years later. The poem leaves open how much we can grieve for someone we hardly had, and it lets the reader feel that the answer might be a great deal.