"Please watch your step" is the language of a sign on a wet floor or a crowded platform. Balachandran V borrows that everyday courtesy to open a poem that ends somewhere far more exposed. What begins as a general request for care turns, in the last two lines, into a private hurt: the speaker's flowers have been trodden on, and the speaker pretends not to mind.
The first stanza works by quiet escalation. "You may be stepping on lives" lifts the warning from the literal to the moral, and the ground underfoot is suddenly crowded. Then comes the sly conditional, "if you consider," which hands the listener a test they are likely to fail. The list that follows, "An ant, a frog, a cockroach or me," is carefully graded. Each creature is a little harder to care about than the last, and the cockroach, the one most people would crush without a thought, stands right beside the speaker. The grammar adds to the effect: three creatures introduced with "a," then the bare pronoun "me," as if the speaker had slipped into the line unannounced. The word "consider" returns as "consideration" in the final line of the stanza, so the list sits inside a frame of repetition. That last word is also stiff and official, the vocabulary of a form letter, and it carries the speaker's chilly sarcasm.
The second stanza is only two lines long, and the shortness is part of its force. "These flowers?" puts them physically before us, on the ground, as though someone has just glanced down. "Ah, never mind" is a shrug with a sigh in it, a performance of not caring that collapses at once: "They were my offerings to you." "Offerings" is a word with devotion in it, suited to love or worship, and the past tense "were" closes the matter, since the gift can no longer be given. The "you" is never identified. It might be a lover, a god, or anyone whose attention the speaker wanted, and the poem's silence keeps the wound open to any reader. The title, "Flowers, squashed," also matters. "Squashed" is a word we usually save for insects, so the flowers are quietly enrolled among the ant and the cockroach, small living things that nobody looked at. The comma before it even reads like a pause as someone looks down and sees the damage.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem sounds like speech, made of short, plain words, and that plainness is what makes the irony cut. The tone moves from instruction to sarcasm to a forced lightness, and the speaker never raises his voice. The sentence in lines three to five hangs on "if you consider," spilling across line breaks and holding the reader in a small pause before the list arrives, as if the speaker were hesitating over whom to include. By contrast, the final line is unadorned and complete, ending on a full stop with nothing more to say.
The poem matters because it joins two things we usually keep apart: kindness to the smallest creatures and the ordinary pain of being overlooked. Someone who does not notice an ant is practising, in miniature, the same carelessness that tramples another person's tenderness. The speaker never accuses, and that restraint is what lets the hurt be heard. "Never mind" is the most telling phrase in the poem, because it is exactly what people say when they mind very much.
The opening address also draws the reader in. Because the poem speaks directly to "you," we become the walker, left to look down and see what our feet have done. In seven short lines, the poem moves from a sign on the pavement to a small heartbreak, and it suggests that carelessness and cruelty are separated only by whether anyone is paying attention.