Ten times Bremarie Gulfan's speaker announces "I hate you," and ten times the closing line quietly cancels it: "I know i'd go back to you." The poem is built like a trap, and that is its subject. Hatred here is a surface feeling with something stronger running underneath, and the title, "Back to You," gives away which one wins before the first stanza begins.
The construction is simple. There are ten three-line stanzas, each with the same frame. The first and last lines both end on "you," so a repeated word does the work of rhyme, and the sound keeps returning the way the speaker knows she or he will. Only the middle line changes, and each one opens a small window onto a memory. There is no regular meter. The lines are short and close to speech, and the rhythm comes from the refrain. By the third stanza the reader can predict the last line, and that predictability makes the return feel inevitable, which is how the speaker feels about it. The poem also has only one full stop, at the very end. Everything before it hangs unfinished, as if the speaker were still circling.
The middle lines use a loose grammar that blurs cause and effect. "I hate you, / The words haunting me again" never says whether the speaker hates the person *because of* the words or whether the words are the hatred. The comma leaves the link open, and hate and haunting run together. The imagery then moves between two senses, hearing and sight. Sound enters first: "Whenever i sing, its like i can hear you," then "Songs only that speaks to me." The other person's voice has seeped into the speaker's own, so even singing becomes a kind of company. Sight follows with "Pictures of sands i walk through" and "The scenes keeps repeating to dust."
The landscape is made of elements: sand, ocean, dust, clouds. Walking through sand suggests slow, tiring progress. In "the tears of ocean deep," tears and sea become one thing, so the grief seems too large for a single person. "Promises flying those clouds" lifts the promises up and out of reach. The most interesting image is the scenes "repeating to dust," because memory is doing two opposite things at once. It loops, so the speaker cannot escape it, and it crumbles, so the speaker cannot hold it either.
The spelling and grammar are rough: "scars that's still left," "scenes keeps," "Im," "its," a lowercase "i." Whatever the cause, these slips give the poem an unpolished, diary-like immediacy, as though the feelings were typed faster than they could be corrected.
The ninth stanza is the turning point: "I needed to loose you to love me." It is the only middle line that reasons rather than remembers. Here the speaker steps back from the memories and names what the loss was for, which was self-love. The spelling "loose," where "lose" is expected, may be a slip, but it lets in a second meaning, to set free. On that reading, the speaker had to let go as well as lose. This makes the refrain that follows more painful, because the speaker understands the cost of leaving and still predicts a return.
The last stanza pushes this further: "I hate you, / When im blind." The poem is full of pictures and scenes, and it ends in blindness. One reading is that hatred needs clear sight, and without it the pull wins. Even the hatred runs out, since this is the one middle line that does not name a cause. The "i'd" in the refrain matters too. It is "would," a prediction rather than a decision, and the speaker talks about returning as if describing the weather.
The poem is significant because the form enacts the feeling. It does not resolve its conflict, and the repetition becomes the compulsion it describes. By the end, "I hate you" no longer reads as an accusation. It reads as a way of not saying the other thing.