Anger arrives first in this untitled poem, and it arrives physically: "I'm tempted to just smack you across your face." The word "just" makes the impulse sound casual, almost tired, as if the speaker has pictured this slap many times. Then comes a line to itself, "Your perfect face." The same face the speaker wants to hit is the one they admit to adoring. Anger and attraction are fixed on the same spot from the very start.
The poem is addressed to someone who may never have known they were loved. "Did you even know that I loved you?" is a real question, but it also works as an accusation. The speaker lists what they hoped for: to kiss the person "senseless," to be craved, to make their "heart ache for me." Almost every wish is about the other person's feelings, not the speaker's own. They want to be wanted, and they want the other person to suffer a little from wanting. "Senseless" also quietly echoes the violence of the opening. Both the kiss and the slap are fantasies of striking the other person's senses and forcing a reaction from a face that gave them none.
The language of money runs through the middle of the poem. "Wasted" appears twice, first with "smiling at" that face and then in "I've wasted years on you." Time becomes something spent badly and "surely" never recovered. That "surely" is revealing, because people say it when they are persuading themselves. The speaker is auditing the relationship and finding a loss. The word "teased" is just as telling. It gives the other person an intention, even though the poem has already wondered whether they knew anything at all. The speaker holds both thoughts at once, that they were ignorant and that they were cruel, and doesn't try to settle the contradiction. That is what makes the voice feel honest instead of tidy.
The best image is the gardening one: "Planted hope in my heart that would only wither away in the end." The heart is soil, the other person is the one who sows, and the speaker only receives. That fits the whole poem, where the speaker sees themselves as someone things were done to. The image also holds a bitter kind of time. Hope was planted early and died slowly, which matches the "years" the poem keeps counting.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular rhythm. It is built from the rhythm of speech, and its effect comes from line length. Short, isolated lines ("Your perfect face." "I've wasted years on you.") land like pauses where the speaker stops to breathe or to hold something back. The longer, looser lines in the middle spill out the way a long-kept grievance does. Repetition does the work that rhyme might have done. "Face" opens the poem twice, "years" returns again and again, and "slap" comes back at the end as if the speaker is circling the same thought.
The ending is where the poem turns. The grammar of the speaker's will changes from "I'm tempted" to "I should slap you" to "you'd probably enjoy that." Each step moves a little further from action and into calculation. Then the poem recasts the relationship as a game: "Because then you'd win / And you don't deserve that satisfaction." Restraint is not presented as kindness or maturity. It is presented as a tactic, a way of denying the other person a prize. There is a small irony in this. A speaker who truly no longer cared would not be working out what the other person would enjoy. Even in refusing to hit them, the speaker is still watching them closely.
That mix of dignity and need is what gives the poem its force. It does not offer a neat healing or a grand statement. It captures a familiar and slightly embarrassing emotion, the fury that comes from unreturned love, and lets it stay a bit ugly. By the end, the poem has become the substitute for the slap. The speaker finally says everything aloud in words, which leaves the other person unhurt but the speaker, at least, no longer silent.