A cheeky, misspelled farewell sits on top of a list of sorrows. That mismatch is worth noticing. "Asta La Vista Baby" is the kind of line you toss over your shoulder with a shrug, yet everything beneath it is about doubt, hiding and the fear of being seen. Judging by the contrast, the title works like a mask: the speaker waves goodbye with swagger while the poem underneath admits how little swagger there is.
The subtitle, "Parallel," explains the construction. The poem is built from five pairs of three-line stanzas, and each pair sets two ideas side by side like railway tracks. Praise is "Rare to attain," achievements "Hard to sustain," and the rhyme of *attain* and *sustain* ties the two stanzas together while the content tells us that good things are scarce and slippery. Then the poem turns the scale upside down. "Doubt, / Dispair" is "Not too uncommon," a flat, almost bored understatement, while delight is "Long forgotten," as if happiness were a language the speaker used to speak. (The spellings "Complements" and "Dispair" look like slips for "Compliments" and "Despair"; I've read them that way.)
The third pair is where the poem gets clever. "Ice, / Freezing, / Yet comforting" and "Fire, / Burning, / Yet warming" both rely on that small word "yet." Ice and fire are opposites, but the speaker finds relief in both. The poem seems to suggest that cold numbness can feel safe, and that even a burning pain is at least proof of feeling something. Neither image is cheerful, but each is survivable.
Rhythm does a lot of quiet work here. The lines are tiny, usually one or two stressed words, and they fall like footsteps. The first half of the poem is made of fragments with no real verbs ("Doubt, / Dispair"), as if the speaker can only point at feelings. From the seventh stanza on, actual verbs arrive: "Impairs," "Strengthens," "Hide," "Brings." The poem moves from listing states to stating causes and effects, from description to something closer to argument.
That argument turns on a neat reversal. "Disease / Impairs / The weak" is what we expect. Then "Weakness / Strengthens / The freaks" swaps the terms around, so that weakness, the very thing disease attacks, becomes a source of strength. The near-rhyme of *weak* and *freaks* links the two ideas. "Freaks" is a harsh word, and the poem seems to take it over rather than flinch from it. Judging by the tone, the speaker identifies as an outsider and claims a toughness that comes from being one.
The closing pair brings the poem's first and only "my." Until now everything was abstract: praise, doubt, ice, disease. Suddenly it is personal: "Shadows / Hide / My face." The answer comes back in the poem's cleanest rhyme: "Exposure / Brings / Disgrace." *Face* and *disgrace* click together like a lock. Shadows protect, but being seen is dangerous. The earlier paradoxes of ice and fire, weakness and strength, now make sense as a way of living in the dark: the speaker survives by staying hidden, and the poem hints that this survival has a price.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from so little. It has no long sentences, no elaborate metaphors, only pairs of plain words that mirror and contradict each other. It also never resolves its tension. Parallel lines do not meet, and the poem's opposites sit beside each other without cancelling out: comfort and pain, strength and weakness, the wish to be seen and the fear of it. The jokey goodbye of the title then reads differently. The speaker is saying "see you later" to the world while staying safely in the shadows, and the poem leaves you wondering whether anyone will be allowed to see the face behind the farewell.