Most love poems open with a grand claim. Dalilahshigaraki's opens with "kinda." "I kinda like your eyes" is a shrug of a line, and the whole poem keeps that shrug while slowly giving it away. What looks like a casual list of reasons turns out to be a portrait of two people who feel overlooked and have found each other. The speaker's central discovery is that being liked can matter less than being accepted, and that being the only person who pays attention can feel like love.
Look at what the reasons actually are. Only a few are about looks: the eyes, the hair, the "pretty face." The rest are about what doesn't happen. "You haven't called me weird yet, / Which a lot of people do." Shared taste in "random music" and shared annoyance at siblings follow, small points of overlap that say *I'm not alone in this*. The speaker's affection is built from relief, and the repeated "I" and "you" in nearly every line keep the two of them locked in a private pairing.
The construction supports this. For six stanzas the poem moves in unrhymed couplets, one reason per pair of lines, like items being ticked off. The couplets sound like speech, with "Cause," "kinda," and "jammed" in place of polished diction. The only link between them is a small echo: "gets it" in the second stanza, "touch it" in the third. Then, in the final two stanzas, real rhyme arrives, with "face" and "race" and then "myself" and "shelf." The shift happens as the feeling grows, so the form itself seems to tighten. "I felt my heart begin to race" is also the smoothest, most regular line in the poem, which is an odd place for smoothness unless the poem is letting its rhythm settle exactly where the speaker's pulse should be unsettled.
The imagery works in a similar way. The first simile, eyes that "shimmer like the stars," is the most familiar image in the poem, the kind of line a love poem almost expects. It also sits awkwardly beside "kinda," as if the speaker reaches for a ready-made phrase and then softens it out of nerves. The moment that really lands comes later: "Even with the mask on," the speaker still sees a "pretty face," and "your eyes scrunched cause you smiled." With the lower face covered, the eyes become the only evidence of the smile, which is a sharper, observed detail that the stars never reach. The speaker moves from the generic to the specific, and the poem is most convincing when it stops decorating and just watches.
Hesitation runs through the middle stanzas as well. "Maybe soon you'll let me touch it?" is the only question in the poem, and "I'd love it if we jammed" is a wish phrased as a condition. These are the lines of someone testing the ground before putting weight on it, which makes the confidence of the ending feel earned.
That ending is the most interesting part. "My favorite thing about you / Is that I have you to myself" is a startling admission, because the favorite reason is that nobody else is paying attention. It sounds a little possessive, and the poem doesn't hide that. The closing metaphor, "my favorite book on the shelf," softens it without erasing it. A book on a shelf is quiet and unread by most people, and something one chooses again and again. It can be cherished or merely owned, and the poem leaves both readings open. (The doubled "you you" in the second-to-last line looks like a slip of the keyboard, though it happens to fit the poem's stumbling, unpolished tone.)
The poem is worth reading because it doesn't pretend. It admits that liking someone can be tangled up with loneliness, that noticing a person can be partly about being noticed back, and that the sweetest reason isn't always the most generous one. The language is plain and the images are borrowed in places, but the honesty about wanting to be understood, and not called weird, is what holds it together.