Honey is slow, sweet, and hard to shake off your fingers, which makes it a sharp way to think about emotion. Brie's poem never mentions honey again after the title, but "thick and sweet" in the first stanza carries it in quietly. The rest of the poem asks what happens when that sweetness turns "cold and bare," and whether even the cold version is better than having no feeling at all. The final question is open, but the poem's construction leans one way: feeling is painful, and numbness is worse.
The first three stanzas are built from the same frame. Each opens with the single word "emotions," adds a short description, then continues with a verb ending in *-ing* and a "with" phrase naming a feeling. The repetition makes emotion seem like a cycle that keeps arriving whether or not you want it. The verbs do the emotional work. Joy is "rolling down your spine" and "bursting in your mind," smooth and then sudden. Pain is "ripping at your heart" and "plaguing your steps." The placement is interesting. Love bursts in the mind, not the heart, so the poem scrambles the usual clichés, as if feeling won't stay where it's supposed to. The parentheses help too. "(slow and weak)" is squeezed into brackets, looking as drained as it sounds, while "(a puppet)" slips in like a whispered stage direction.
The third stanza changes the terms. The "with" words are now "dominance" and "strength," which are forces, not feelings. Emotions are "holding you down" and "breaking you down," and the strength belongs to them, not to you. This is the poem's bleakest picture of helplessness, and the puppet image is its centre.
Then comes the shortest stanza, and the most unsettling: "emotions, / taking their time. / you consider shortening yours." The word "time" turns slippery. Emotions linger like thick honey, and the "you" wants to cut short something of their own. That could mean their feeling or something far darker, and the poem doesn't say. The restraint is what makes the line chilling.
There is no rhyme or steady metre here, so rhythm comes from line length and punctuation. The fifth stanza is where that becomes most obvious. "love, lose, break,bruise, / scream,cry, smile,shake,sing,dance" is crammed together, with missing spaces after the commas, so the words tumble over each other. The list refuses to sort feelings into good and bad. "Smile" sits between "cry" and "shake," and "shake" could mean fear or laughter. Then the list tips into the heavy nouns "anger,pain,shame." After all that crowding, "or / nothing ." arrives like a door closing. The flat repetition of "you feel nothing. / absolutely nothing" empties the page, and the odd habit of putting a space before each full stop leaves every one standing alone like a held breath.
The last stanza stretches into longer, plainer lines and speaks straight to the reader. "Suffer from emotion" treats feeling like an illness, yet the closing phrase, "not even your emotions to guide you," reverses the puppet. The strings that held you down become a compass. "More alone than you were before" also hints that the speaker is already lonely, and that feeling, however painful, is at least a kind of company.
The poem is not perfectly balanced. "The choice" is presented as only two options, everything or nothing, with no middle ground. But that is also why it feels true to an overwhelmed mind, where life can seem to offer only flood or drought. Its significance lies in making an abstract question physical. Emotion is something that rolls down a spine, rips at a heart, and slows a step, so its absence feels like a real loss. By never using "I" and addressing "you," the poem pulls the reader into the dilemma and leaves the answer to them.