Three words open the poem, and they are the strangest in it: "my arms feel wrong." Nothing is explained yet, but the line suggests the odd emptiness of arms with nothing left to hold. Only gradually do we see why. The speaker is cataloguing the body of someone loved, and the last line reveals the whole scene as a farewell: "it feels like a goodbye, and it was." At its centre is the idea that love means paying attention, and that to know a person fully is to know their wounds as well as their best moments.
The poem is built as a list, and the order of that list matters. It begins with a fall from a tree "when you were a kid," moves to a slip on a bench and a pair of ripped trousers, then to a fight outside a supermarket, and only then to "the ones on your wrists that you did on your own." The final item, the "many small burn marks" left by the dad's cigarettes, is the heaviest. The scars travel from accident, to embarrassment, to aggression, to self-harm, to harm done by someone else. The repeated "the one… the one… the one…" gives the passage the rhythm of a recited inventory, and the shift to "the ones" and then "the many" marks the moment the list stops being gentle. The reader, like the speaker's hands, is pulled steadily into darker territory.
The details are small but telling. "That tree" and "that bench" use the word "that" as if both people already share these places, so the speaker knows each scar as a story and not only as a mark on skin. The tone stays quiet even when the subject is painful. The wrist scars are described only as ones "you did on your own," a phrase that avoids the clinical word and quietly hints at loneliness. The father's cruelty is delivered just as plainly: the burns are "scattered across your body," a verb that sounds almost careless, as though the damage was done casually. Calling the burns "small" is an understatement that makes them hurt more. The poem never lingers or explains, and that restraint is where its tenderness lies.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme, written in lowercase and with almost no punctuation apart from commas and a single full stop at the end. The first line is short and abrupt, and the second runs on and on, as though the speaker cannot stop for breath. The word "rapidly" and the phrase "dying to memorise" give the touching urgency, and "dying" carries an unintended shadow of mortality that fits both the finality of a goodbye and the scars the speaker is learning. The line "memorising them all, good and bad" is flat and balanced, and it refuses to rank the cheerful scars above the painful ones. Every mark is accepted equally.
The ending changes the poem's meaning. Until the last line the hands seem to move in the present tense, and then "and it was" drops into the past. Perhaps the touching happened on a final night, or perhaps the speaker is reliving it in memory, with the "wrong" arms of the first line belonging to the aftermath. The poem never says which, and that ambiguity helps it. The title, "(e.j.p)", looks like a set of initials in brackets, which may suggest a private, personal address, though the poem itself gives no further clue.
What makes the poem significant is how it handles difficult material. Self-harm and abuse are present, but nothing is sensationalised or turned into a lesson. They sit in the same list as a childhood tumble, as part of one person's history. The poem's quiet claim is that tenderness means taking in everything, including what hurts to look at, and that a goodbye can be an act of love as well as loss.