Nobody in AngelRiviera's "Together" says the love is over, yet the whole poem is told in the past tense. "We were rockets," "we were jesters," "we were happy": every verb looks backwards. That small grammatical fact gives a poem of apparent celebration a quiet ache, and it is the key to reading it.
On the surface, the poem lists what two people were when they were a pair: thrill-seekers, partners in mischief, tender dreamers. Its central idea is that love can build a private world so complete that everything outside it shrinks. Earth becomes "so small, so insignificant, / Compared to us both." The poem also suggests that this world is being remembered rather than lived in.
The structure is tightly patterned. Three five-line stanzas each open with "Together we were" and a pair of nouns that start with the same sound: "rockets and roller coasters," "jesters and jokers," "dancers and dreamers." The alliteration gives the lines a bright, chanting energy, and the pairs move upward in feeling, from speed to humour to imagination. There is no end rhyme and no regular metre. The poem reads like free verse, close to speech, and the repeated opening does the work rhyme might do. Each stanza also lands on a short line, such as "Compared to us both," "And woke up content," and "Of forever and always." Each works like an exhale after a long sentence. Then the poem shrinks to a two-line close: "Together we were happy, / Together, you and me." Only here do "you" and "me" appear as separate words. Until now the couple has been fused into "we" and "us." Read warmly, this is a tender summing-up. Read more suspiciously, it is the moment memory pulls the pair apart, and the poem's last word is "me," a single voice.
The imagery travels from the cosmic to the earthly. In the first stanza, "spiraled and loop-de-looped into space" uses a playful, childlike compound that loops in the mouth as the lovers loop in the air. The sky is "the color of octopus ink," a strange and memorable comparison that drops a sea creature into the heavens. Judging by the image, the night feels liquid and enclosing, as if the couple were swimming rather than flying. Ink is also what an octopus releases to hide, which may hint at a world closed off from everyone else.
The second stanza comes down to a more reckless, human level. They laugh and drink "too much liquor," so much that they "sleep through ringing / Of our reverberating thoughts." The phrasing is slightly awkward, with "too much that" where we might expect "so much that," but the idea is vivid: thoughts that ring and echo like an alarm, silenced by sleep. The poem suggests, without insisting, that the laughter and drink switch off some worry. "Woke up content" is then the shortest, flattest line in the stanza, as if contentment meant simply the absence of noise.
The third stanza is the most grounded. After rockets comes an "old oak tree," an image of age and roots that contrasts with all that speed. Hearts beat "to the same soothing breeze," which blends body and weather, and the stars "blossomed," bringing flowers into the sky. Yet the promises of "forever and always" are "sent" by the stars, not spoken by the lovers. They are also the most worn phrase in the poem. Set against the past tense, they sound faintly ironic: promises from the sky, which has no way of keeping them.
The poem is not complex, and it does not need to be. Its significance lies in how much it achieves with plain words and a clear shape. The repeated "Together" reads at first as certainty, then as a refrain someone keeps returning to because it is hard to let go. For students, it is a good example of how tense, repetition and a change in line length can carry meaning that the poem never states outright. Happiness here is not described as it happens. It is recalled, simplified and polished until it glitters.