The title, "What we do not want," stops just short of its own ending. It takes the whole poem to supply the missing words, which arrive in the last line: "what we do not want to know." That small delay sets up the poem's central idea. We spend a great deal of effort refusing to look at or listen to something, and the effort is pointless, because the knowledge is already inside us.
The poem is built from three short stanzas. The first two are twins. "We keep our eyes shut / in fear / of what we might see / of ourselves..." is answered by "we keep our ears closed / for fear / of what we might hear / our heart says..." Both begin with the same deliberate act, and both turn the senses inward. Eyes and ears normally face the outside world, but here they are shut against the self. What the speaker dreads seeing is "ourselves," and what the speaker dreads hearing is the heart. The second stanza is a little compressed, with "hear / our heart says" leaving out a word the reader has to supply, as though the grammar were hurrying past an uncomfortable idea. The poem never says what the self or the heart might reveal. That silence is a choice. Any reader can fill the gap with their own unspoken truth, which is why the poem can say "we" and mean almost anyone. Nothing in it points to a particular event, though it is signed from Trivandrum and dated 2009.
Notice how the verbs change in the third stanza. In the first two, "we keep" is an active, chosen verb, and we are the ones doing the shutting. Then the body takes over: "our hands shiver," "our mind hesitates." These things happen to us, and they cannot be switched off like eyes or ears. The sequence moves from what we control to what we cannot, and in that movement the pretence fails. The shivering hands give the game away. The word "hesitates" is also the longest in the poem and breaks up the run of short, plain words, so it makes the reader hesitate too.
Then comes the dash, the poem's pivot, and the two lines that follow: "we know / we know." Each gets a line to itself, so the repetition sounds like an admission that is difficult to say and hard to stop saying. It also quietly corrects the first stanzas. There, fear was tied to the word "might": what we *might* see, what we *might* hear. That word suggests uncertainty and a truth still safely out of reach. By the end, "might" has been overruled by "know." The fear only makes sense because some part of us has already seen and heard. The final line holds the paradox neatly: we know what we do not want to know. Knowing and not-wanting-to-know sit in the same sentence, and neither cancels the other.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. It is free verse, with short lines and little punctuation, and every line begins in lower case. This suits the subject, since nothing is formally settled or concluded. Its music comes from repetition instead: "we keep... we keep," "of what we might... of what we might," "when... when," "we know / we know." The soft *w* sounds of "we," "what," "when," "want" run through the poem like a lowered voice. The three ellipses matter too. The first two trail off just where the truth is about to be named, which is the poem's own evasion in typographic form. The last one, after "know," leaves the thought open, as if the speaker could go on but would rather not.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it uses to show a very human habit of self-deception. It has no argument, no moral and no confession. It gives two closed senses, a trembling hand and a hesitating mind, and trusts the reader to recognise the situation. The poem also does what it describes: it never says what we do not want to know, and in that way it lets the reader sense the weight of the thing without looking at it directly.