The word "funny" appears three times in these twelve lines, and not once does it mean amusing. It means strange, ironic, a little painful, the way someone says "funny, isn't it?" when they have just noticed something that stings. That offhand word sets the poem's tone: a speaker talking half to themselves, trying to treat a loss lightly and not quite managing it.
The poem is credited to ebarrera, and nothing is supplied about when or why it was written, so the safest ground is the text. Who "they" are is never revealed. They could be family, friends, or a partner, and the poem refuses to say. What it does give us is the experience of their absence, and its central idea is simple and true: we notice what we depend on only once it is gone. Familiarity dulls attention, and loss sharpens it again.
The opening question, "I wonder if they miss us," quickly turns back on itself. The speaker is wondering whether the feeling is mutual, but the next lines give the real answer: "Now that we're without them / We can hardly stand ourselves." Wondering about the others is a way of admitting how much the speaker misses them. The pronouns also shift from a single "I" to a collective "we," as if a private thought has turned out to be a shared condition. The phrase "hardly stand ourselves" suggests the absence leaves the speakers poor company for themselves, not merely lonely.
The second half is built on a neat mirror. "It's funny when they're here" leads to "how we take for granted," and "it's funny when they're gone" leads to "just how bad we miss them." The repeated sentence frame makes presence and absence feel like two sides of one coin, and the "And" at the start of line nine acts as a hinge between them. The sentences also sound spoken. "Well it's funny…" begins with the filler word of someone gathering their thoughts, and "so empty" and "bad" are everyday words, not poetic ones.
That conversational feel carries into the rhythm. There is no regular metre. The lines run to roughly six or eight syllables, and the stresses fall where a speaker would naturally put them. Rhyme is almost absent, with one exception: "sound" in line eight is answered by "around" in the last line. The echo arrives at the very end, giving a faint click of closure that the meaning refuses to grant, since nothing has been resolved.
The most striking passage is the list: "The way they taste, the way they feel, / Their sight, their smell, their sound." Taste, touch, sight, smell and hearing together cover all five senses, a full inventory of everything the body registers about another person. The grammar tightens as the list goes on. The looser "the way they…" gives way to the compact "their sight, their smell, their sound," where the soft repeated s sounds almost hush the line. There is an irony here too. The speaker claims these things were taken for granted, yet the list is precise and loving, which shows that absence has made the speaker notice everything.
Against that sensory detail, the ending is deliberately plain. "Life can be so empty / When they're not around" uses the flattest vocabulary in the poem, and "not around" is the sort of phrase you would use about someone who has popped out for an hour. That mismatch between casual wording and large feeling is where the ache lives. The poem understates because the speaker is trying to sound fine and failing.
The poem's significance lies in its recognition, not in any grand statement. It never explains who has gone or why, so almost anyone can fill in the gap with their own absence. It also makes a quiet point about attention. By cataloguing the taste, feel, sight, smell and sound of the people it misses, the poem does what the speaker admits they once failed to do, which is to notice.