The poem opens with a list of rules: "Don't show feelings, / Never react to something, / Don't look them in the eye, / Don't show the suffering, / Never utter a word." Five lines, five prohibitions, and none says what to do, only what to hide. Barry Cotton's untitled poem, marked only by three asterisks like a thought without a name, begins as a survival manual. The commands are aimed at "you," but by the end it seems the speaker has been instructing themselves all along.
The central idea is that concealment, which starts as protection, ends as self-erasure. The poem follows that logic step by step. First comes silence. Then comes the sense of being an instrument: others are "just using you, / For something they don't want to touch." The poem never says what this "something" is, and it would be a mistake to invent an answer. The vagueness is part of the effect, and "touch" suggests something awkward or unclean that other people prefer to leave to someone else. Then comes bitter acceptance: "That's how they show the 'love'." The quotation marks around *love* work like a sneer, turning the word into something that has to be put in inverted commas to be said at all.
The form suits this. There is no rhyme and no steady meter. The lines are short and clipped, often cut off by commas, so the poem sounds like speech through clenched teeth. The stanzas run to five, three, four, four and three lines, and the poem makes no effort to tidy itself into a pattern. The word "never" runs through it like a bolt sliding across a door: "Never utter a word" in the first stanza, "They never think that you are the one" in the second, "They never know you" in the last. The speaker cannot speak, and the others cannot see.
The fourth stanza is where the poem changes gear. The commands give way to a half-overheard conversation: "Did you tell them that you wanna die? / Yeah? So do they believe it? / They think it's a joke? right?" The speaker asks the questions and answers them too, rehearsing a scene whose ending is already known. Then comes the loudest moment in the poem: "HAHAHAH, I knew it," in capitals, laughter printed on the page. It is unclear whose laugh it is, the listeners' or the speaker's own bitter one, and perhaps that is the point, since being laughed at and laughing at yourself blur together. "I knew it" echoes "You know it from the beginning" in the previous stanza, so the disappointment was expected before it arrived. The line ends on a comma, the sentence left hanging.
The grammar is rough in places: "Don't be fool," "I don't knew well about myself," "wanna." These slips make the voice sound spoken rather than composed. A reader might guess the writer is not working in a first language, but that is only a guess. Either way, the roughness fits a poem about not being heard. Nothing here has been polished for an audience.
The last stanza turns inward. "They never know you, so do I / Even me, / I don't knew well about myself." The pronouns slide from *you* to *I* to *me* to *myself*, as if the poem had been circling the self and has finally landed. "Even me," is a stumble, a line that hesitates before admitting the worst part. The reasoning is quiet but sharp: someone who never shows anything to the world eventually loses the ability to read it themselves. Silence outward becomes silence inward.
The poem is significant because it offers no rescue and no hopeful turn, and because of the way it is built. The rules of the first stanza read at first like a character trait, but after the laughter they read like a consequence: this is what is left after you say something true and are not believed. The poem is circular, with the ending explaining the beginning. That makes it a pointed reminder for readers that words like "I wanna die" are never to be treated as jokes, and that being dismissed can teach someone to say nothing at all. If anything in these lines feels familiar, telling a trusted person, such as a parent, teacher or school counsellor, matters more than any poem.