A farewell usually comes at the end of a story, but "Asta La Vista Baby" delivers one before the story has properly begun. The title borrows a swaggering catchphrase, spelled without the usual "h", and the subtitle «Random rhymes» promises something offhand. The poem underneath is less breezy. It is a string of short, aching fragments about being drawn to someone and watching the feeling collapse, and the cool tone of the title starts to look like a brave face.
The poem runs through six small stanzas, and each one is a stage in the relationship. It starts with a glance: "Eye capturing, / Yet deceiving." The singular "Eye" suggests one look, one moment of attraction, and the word "Yet" undermines it at once. What catches the eye cannot be trusted. Then comes a four-word stack: "Soul, / Madness, / Whole, / Disaster." The words alternate between the tender and the destructive, so closeness and ruin are never more than a line apart. "Soul" and "Whole" are also the poem's clearest full rhyme, which makes the subtitle half a joke: the rhymes are there, but they turn up where you don't expect them.
The third stanza, "Heart entrapped, / Mind enraptured," is the most carefully built. "Entrapped" and "enraptured" share the same prefix and nearly the same sounds, yet one means imprisonment and the other ecstasy. The speaker seems to be captive and delighted at once, with the heart and the mind disagreeing about what is happening. Next, "Unknown, / Feelings, / Just utter, / Longing" lets the line breaks work against grammar. "Unknown" hangs alone like a feeling without a name. "Just utter" can be read as a plain adjective, meaning complete longing, or as a quiet command to speak, which the poem never does.
The fifth stanza is the shortest turning point: "Loving, / Leaving." The two words are almost the same sound, with the same L, the same "v" and the same "-ing", and only the vowel changes. In sound, as in the story, one slides into the other. "Leaving" also echoes "deceiving" from the first stanza, so the poem's opening suspicion and its farewell chime across the whole piece. The final stanza, "Sad, / Endings, / No, / Beginning," hinges on that lone "No." It can mean "no beginning", but set apart by commas it also sounds like a refusal. Either way, the last word is "Beginning", the very thing being denied, so the poem ends on the word for what it cannot have.
Rhythm here comes from structure rather than meter. Lines carry one or two stresses at most, so each break works like a held breath. The stanzas alternate two lines, four lines, two, four, two, four, and the pattern has a pulse. The couplets are all sharp contrasts (capturing against deceiving, entrapped against enraptured, loving against leaving). The quatrains pile up feelings like a spill. Nearly every stanza is a chain of commas ending in a single full stop, so the poem never pauses to explain itself. The pervasive "-ing" endings (capturing, deceiving, feelings, longing, loving, leaving, endings, beginning) give a sense of continuing action. The subject is endings, yet the grammar keeps everything in motion and unresolved.
The poem gives us no background about who wrote it or why, so its interest lies in its compression. It has no "I" and no "you", and it never says who is speaking or who is being left. The only person addressed is the "Baby" of the title. That absence makes the feeling easy to borrow, since any reader who has lost someone can fill the gaps. It also leaves the speaker strangely alone with the feeling. The title is the line said out loud, glib and confident. The poem is everything that stays unsaid underneath it, and a reader can feel the gap between the two.