Six short lines, and a whole romance has begun, soured and ended. Dacey's "The First Guy" squeezes the life cycle of a first love into something close to a shrug, and the shrug is what makes it sting. The speaker describes no particular boy and no particular summer. The poem offers a rule instead: "There's always the first guy." That "always" turns a private hurt into a shared fact of life, passed on with a tired, knowing half-smile.
The central idea is that first love works less like a destination than like an initiation, and that it follows a script. The poem lays the script out as a chain: guy, try, lie, goodbye, broken heart. The word "try" matters here. You try a new sport or a new food, and the word suggests a practice run. Calling love an attempt "At love" makes the first guy sound like a rehearsal, yet the poem won't let the rehearsal be painless. The attempt becomes "the first lie," and the poem never says whose lie it is. It could be his deceit, or a falsehood the speaker told themselves in order to stay. The gap is left for the reader to fill.
A small grammatical wobble deserves a second look. The poem begins with a singular "guy" and slips into a plural: "They're the first try." In casual speech that is a natural slip, and it suits the voice. It also does quiet work, because the individual boy dissolves into a type, all first guys at once. He gets no name and no description, only a position in the order. "First" appears four times in five lines, each time attached to a different stage, so the poem seems less interested in him than in firstness itself, the way everything is new once and then never new in quite the same way again.
The sound does much of the emotional work. Four line endings, "guy," "try," "lie" and "goodbye," share one bright, ringing rhyme, which gives the poem the bounce of a skipping-rope chant. That sing-song sits uncomfortably against what is being said, and the feeling lives in the gap between them. There is even a small bitter irony in "goodbye," which begins with "good." Then the pattern is interrupted. "At love," sits alone on a two-syllable line and rhymes with nothing. The break after "try" makes the reader pause before the most important word in the poem, as if the speaker hesitates to say it.
Line length tells its own story. After that two-syllable pause the lines grow, from six syllables to nine in "And after that comes the first goodbye," then eight. Two lines in a row begin with "And," so the speaker sounds like someone warming to a story and piling on details faster than they can sort them. The last line, "And don't forget the broken heart," has the tone of a friend adding an afterthought, which is a sly way to deliver the heaviest item on the list. Its final word, "heart," is also the one word in the sequence that refuses to join the rhyme. The chant breaks at exactly the point where the heart does. Whether or not that was planned, the form acts out the meaning.
Then there is the final comma. The poem ends without a full stop, so the sentence hangs open. It is hard not to read that as unfinished business: either the hurt hasn't resolved, or the very idea of a "first" guy implies a second waiting somewhere in the grammar. The title promises a first, the text never delivers a second, and the comma is where one would begin.
That is what makes this small poem worth reading. It has no elaborate metaphors and no grand claims, only plain talk, a list and a rhyme. Yet it shows how much feeling can ride on choices as modest as where a line breaks, which word won't rhyme, and which punctuation mark closes the page. It sounds overheard rather than written, and that familiarity is its power, because almost any reader can finish the sentence the comma leaves open.