Almost everything in "Can I." is a wish, and the poem saves its only doubt for the last two lines. A speaker, who calls herself "the only girl in his mind," lists what she wants from a man she cannot have. Only at the very end do we learn why: "he doesn't exist." The poem never says who he is. Judging by the text, he could be a fictional character, an idealised partner, or someone she has built entirely in her imagination. That vagueness is useful, because it lets many readers find their own version of him in the poem.
The structure is simple and does a lot of work. Eleven lines of longing come before the question, and nearly all of them run on the same pattern: "I want to stay," "I want to read," "I want to hold," "I want to hear." This repetition piles up like a breathless confession, and the lines are mostly separated by commas rather than full stops, so the speaker seems to be pouring everything out in one go. The first and eleventh lines are identical ("I want to stay with him all the time"), which closes the list into a loop. She ends exactly where she began, which is how wishing for the impossible tends to feel. Then comes the pivot, "But can I get him?", and the rhythm breaks. The repeated "I want" gives way to a question with no answer.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short, plain and close to speech, which suits a poem that sounds more like a thought said aloud than a composed performance. The title, "Can I.", is the question from the ending, cut short and closed with a full stop instead of a question mark. It reads like a request that has already been half-refused.
The imagery is domestic rather than grand. She doesn't imagine dramatic gestures. She imagines reading a book together, cooking a meal, holding a hand, hearing a voice, feeling "his warm body." Together these touch most of the senses: touch, hearing, even taste through the cooking. Ordinary closeness is exactly what is missing, and the smallness of the wishes makes the loss sharper. The most revealing wish is probably the second: "I wanted to hug he and say / 'It's okay, you did it right.'" It is the only line in the past tense, and it is the only one with spoken words in it. It suggests a scene she has already imagined, in which he has struggled or doubted himself and she is the one who reassures him. Her love is partly a wish to comfort, not only to be comforted.
The poem also contains grammatical slips: "hug he" and "cook for he," where standard English would have "him." Whatever their cause, they give the poem an unpolished, unedited feel, and they appear at moments of tenderness. The text does not tell us whether they are deliberate, so it is safest to say only that they add to the sense of an unguarded voice.
The line "I want to feel loved too" holds a quiet ambiguity. "Too" could mean that she wants to be loved as others are, or that she wants to be loved as she loves him. Either way, it shows that the fantasy is also about her own unmet need, and not only about him.
The final line is the most intriguing: "Just because he doesn't exist?" It can be read two ways. She may be asking whether she can have him even though he is not real. Or she may be protesting that the only obstacle is that he is not real, as if that were a minor technicality. The second reading is partly comic, partly heartbreaking. There is an irony in it too. She wants a place in his mind, but his mind is the one thing that cannot exist, while he exists perfectly well in hers.
What makes the poem significant is its honesty about a feeling that people often hide: strong attachment to someone imagined. It doesn't mock the speaker or explain her away. It lets her list her wants, then gives her one clear-eyed, painful question.