Two lines, one sentence, not a single capital letter: "Backwards Track" reads like a thought typed out in a low moment and left untidied. Its subject is the discouragement that comes with trying to improve. The speaker wants to change, whether a habit, a mood or a whole way of living, and every attempt seems to cost more than it earns. The central idea is the gap between effort and visible progress. Moving forward is not the hard part. The hard part is that the movement seems to be cancelled out, over and over, by something much bigger.
The first line is plain and almost conversational: "how am i ever supposed to change". The lowercase "i" makes the speaker small and unguarded, with no formal voice to hide behind. Two words carry most of the weight. "Supposed" is passive and faintly accusatory, because it implies some unnamed authority, whether parents, teachers, society or the speaker's own conscience, that has decided change is required. The poem never says who is doing the supposing, which makes the pressure feel everywhere and nowhere. "Ever" turns a practical question into a despairing one. The speaker is not asking for a method. They are doubting that any method exists. The line break after "change" also lets the word hang for a moment before the complaint arrives.
That complaint is the second line: "when every step forward feels like three thousand back". "When" shifts the sentence from question to protest, so it is closer to a rhetorical cry than a request for advice. The imagery is physical and mathematical at once. A step is the smallest unit of travel, and "three thousand" is a number so large and so exact that it sounds like an exaggeration made by someone who has been counting. The sums are impossible, and that is the point: this is arithmetic as the speaker feels it, not as it could be measured. The phrase "feels like" is worth noticing. The speaker does not claim to have lost three thousand steps, only that it seems that way. Judging by that word, the poem leaves a narrow gap between perception and fact, and a reader might wonder whether progress is hiding inside the exhaustion.
The poem is also built around an omission. "Three thousand back" has no noun, so the word "steps" is left unsaid. That compression suits the mood, since the speaker is too tired to finish the phrase, and it lets "back" land as the final, heaviest word. The rhythm helps. The first line runs to about nine syllables and moves fairly evenly. The second stretches to about twelve and piles up hard, short words: "step," "feels," "three," "back." Reading it aloud, you almost have to trudge. There is no end rhyme, which suits a poem about failing to reach resolution, but there is a pull of sound in "forward feels," with its repeated f, and in the soft "th" of "three thousand."
The title does some of the most interesting work. "Backwards Track" shares its sounds with the poem's last word, since "back" sits inside "Backwards" and rhymes closely with "track." The ending seems to loop back to the title, as if the poem cannot escape its own direction. "Track" has several meanings that the poem lets echo. It can be a path to walk, a running lane, a record of progress, or the idea of being "on track." In each sense it is running the wrong way. The name credited with the poem, Ancient Artifact, adds an irony of its own. An artifact is something preserved and fixed, and here it sits beside a poem about how hard it is to stop being what you have been. I know nothing about who stands behind that name, so this is only a reading of the words on the page, but the contrast is hard to ignore.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space, and how honest it is. It offers no lesson and no sudden hope, and it doesn't pretend that wanting to change is the same as changing. For a young reader, its value may be recognition: the sense that setbacks feel enormous from the inside, and that someone has put that feeling into words precisely enough to look at. By ending on "back" and not on a promise, the poem lets the discouragement stand. That choice makes it believable.