Few images of heartbreak are as unglamorous as the one at the center of "First Love" by dee: a lover compared to chewing gum stuck under a school desk. The speaker has spent two years trying to wipe a former partner from her mind. The poem is a record of how badly that is going. Its central idea is that a first love can't be deleted by willpower, because it lives in the senses, in objects and in the imagination, and the speaker is only just beginning to see that the person she keeps alive exists mostly inside her own head.
The poem opens with a plan: "the giant eraser of my mind." Erasing is a tidy, schoolroom idea, and the poem then takes it apart. The speaker's own metaphors keep sliding out of her control. The eraser gives way to gum, and the gum to "filaments" and a "web of my thoughts." This mixing feels deliberate. A mind trying to impose order on a memory is shown failing to keep even its own comparisons in line. The gum image is also honest about how love feels afterward. It isn't tragic or noble, it's sticky, a little disgusting, and a "punishment," like a detention chore. The phrase "gooey gum" is almost comic, and that comedy keeps the poem from self-pity. Yet the bits that remain "grow and grow" and come back "Stronger," a word left alone on its own line as if the memory had the last word.
The poem is free verse, with no end rhyme and no regular meter. Its rhythm comes from repetition and from lines that run on in a spoken, confessional way. "I've tried" opens the first lines and returns as "I've tried to erase the idea of you," so the speaker seems to be circling the same failure. The commas at the ends of lines slow the poem down, then "No matter what, / No matter how hard I scrape" makes it push forward like the scraping itself. Sound plays a small part too, in the soft stickiness of "gooey gum" and "Stuck to the desks."
The middle of the poem turns from frustration to tenderness, and it becomes visual and sensory. The cologne detail is clever: it was "too strong" once, but memory has made it faint, so her nose strains to catch a scent that no longer exists. Then come the flashes seen "just before the pitch blackness comes," the half-asleep moment when guards are down. She sees "smooth chocolate skin" and a back "Marked by some artist," which judging by the wording could be a tattoo, and she imagines the artist as lucky "to be able to landscape on your body." Using "landscape" as a verb turns the body into terrain, something large and worth exploring. The comparison to Atlas pushes this further: "I bet you once held the world as he did, / At least you do to me." The casual "I bet" and the quiet correction in the next line show she knows this is exaggeration, and she lets it stand anyway. That is how first love distorts: the speaker sees the flaw in her own picture and still can't stop painting it.
The list of keepsakes is where the poem's tension shows most clearly. She has been trying to erase her lover, yet she still has "your jacket in my closet, / Your boxers in my dresser" and a jewelry box "Stuffed neatly" with letters. The word "neatly" stands out against the chaos of the mind. The speaker is careful with the physical evidence even while claiming she wants the memory gone.
The turn is a tangled chiasmus: "First loves are love's lasts, / And love's lasts are love's firsts." The reversal is confusing on purpose, since she admits she has it "all mixed up." The final sentence breaks across a line, "Until I realize / that the only way you'll love me back is in my dreams," and it is deliberately quiet and flat. The grammar matters, because "Until" makes the obsession end only when she accepts the truth, and the poem stops just before that happens. Her dreams also connect back to the closed eyes of the earlier lines, so the poem ends where the memories arrive.
The poem is significant for its unpolished honesty. It borrows its images from desks, erasers and dressers, and it lets heartbreak be awkward and slightly ridiculous. That makes the feeling believable, and readers who recognize it will probably also recognize that moment when you're not over someone yet.