Eight times a word is said twice, and eight times a single adverb shuts the door on it. That small pattern drives "Fleeting" by Asta La Vista Baby, a poem about being pushed out of a relationship by someone who seems to find the whole thing amusing. Its central idea is that heartbreak is not one event but a chain of sensations: suffocation, humiliation, anger, despair. The speaker moves through them quickly, yet each is felt at full weight.
The construction is strict. Every stanza has three lines: a doubled word, a short clause, and a closing adverb ending in "-ly". There is no conventional rhyme, but the shared ending works like one. "Properly," "Dreadfully," "Painfully," "Cruelly" and the rest chime like a bell or a list of charges read out in court. The doubled openings, "Enclosing, enclosing" and "Tainted, tainted," read like a stammer or a gasp that can't finish. Because the lines are so short, reading aloud forces a pause before each adverb, and the adverb lands as a verdict. "I can't breathe, / Properly" is quietly unsettling, since the adverb makes the panic sound almost polite.
The imagery starts in the body and moves outward. First come lungs and "poisoned" air, then sound: a voice that "cuts," laughter that "rings." Treating a voice as a blade makes mockery physical, and the poem keeps its images this simple and direct. The most telling pairing is "Cruelly" followed by "Casually." The speaker's adverbs are all pain-words (dreadfully, painfully, agonisingly), but "Casually" belongs to the other person. While one person suffocates, the other is "Walking, walking," with laughter trailing behind. The poem suggests that this ease hurts more than the cruelty does. "Playing games" frames the whole relationship as something the other person can walk away from without cost.
The sixth stanza is the only one that looks forward: "Plotting, plotting, / Revenge will come, / Eventually." The poem never says who is plotting, and that ambiguity is useful. It could be the other person's scheming or the speaker's own fantasy. Either way, "Eventually" takes the heat out of the threat. It is a word for things that are postponed, and the revenge reads more like consolation than a plan. Next, "Darkness, darkness, / Lying to me, / Convincingly" makes darkness a persona who deceives. Judging by the imagery, this may be despair itself, a voice in the speaker's head that is persuasive precisely because the speaker is already hurt.
The last stanza changes the pattern. The doubled words so far have mostly been "-ing" forms, but "Love, love" is a plain noun, repeated like a cry after someone leaving. It echoes the earlier "Walking, walking," and now we hear the speaker calling after the walker. "Leaving me" is in the present continuous, so the departure never finishes. The closing "Agonisingly" is also one of the longest words in the poem, so the final line stretches out where earlier ones snapped shut.
That stretching sets up the tension with the title. "Fleeting" suggests something brief, but the poem's structure refuses to let time move quickly. Every repetition makes the reader sit in the moment longer. The title could describe the love, which is vanishing, while the pain is anything but fleeting. The pen name, a spelling of the farewell "hasta la vista, baby," fits a poem about leaving, whether or not that was intended.
The poem matters for how much it does with very little. Adverbs are usually the forgettable words in a sentence, but here they carry all the emotional judgement. Try deleting them and what remains is a neutral list of actions: enclosing, jesting, walking, leaving. The feeling lives in the adverbs. For students, that makes it a clear example of how form can act out emotion, and how a repeated pattern can feel like being trapped in it.