Put a cigarette next to a blade and most people would see two unrelated habits. The poem insists on seeing one. "She smokes / He cuts" is stated with the flat symmetry of a headline, and the next two lines give the argument: "Different things / But for the same reasons." The poem never says what those reasons are. That withholding seems deliberate, and it is what the title, "Unspoken words," points to. The subject is serious, and the poem handles it plainly, without describing any act in detail.
The second stanza builds on balance. "She's harmed / On the inside / He's harmed / On the out." The paired lines mirror each other, and the slightly clipped, colloquial "on the out" (instead of the tidier "outside") makes the stanza sound blunt and unpolished. The poem's central irony begins here. One kind of harm happens beneath the surface, the other on it, and yet both are invisible. The third stanza makes this explicit. "Her skin hides / The effects / Long sleeves / Hide his." The verb "hide" appears twice, and the skin and the sleeves become two kinds of clothing for the same secret. Skin, which we usually think of as what reveals a person, here works as camouflage.
The fourth stanza turns concealment into a kind of tragedy: "With the disguises / She can't see his pain / And he can't see hers." The sentence is perfectly symmetrical, and the symmetry is what hurts. Each is the one person who could understand the other, and each is blocked by the other's disguise. The poem also controls its pronouns. Through most of the text "She" and "He" occupy separate lines, almost separate worlds. Only in the last stanza do "Their" and "they both" bring them into one grammatical unit, and by then the speaker, who is never an "I" and seems to see what neither character can, is the only one who knows how alike they are.
The last stanza contains the poem's key contrast between faces and eyes. "Their eyes tell / The unspoken words" is a paradox, since eyes speak when mouths do not. But the next line undercuts it: "With smiles on their faces." The smile is another disguise, worn like the long sleeves, and nobody is reading the eyes. The spelling "bye" in "As they walk bye" is probably a slip for "by," but it can't help echoing "goodbye," which quietly fits the poem's ending.
That ending is also where the form changes. Until now the poem is unrhymed and made of very short lines, often only two or three words, which gives it a clipped, withheld rhythm, like someone choosing what not to say. The final stanza is the longest, and its last two lines contain the poem's only real rhyme: "walk bye" and "want to die." The rhyme clicks shut like a latch. A sing-song sound attached to the bleakest statement in the poem is unsettling, and the longer final line spills over the short ones as if the confession could no longer be held back. The word "both" matters too, because it tells us the hidden wish is shared.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. By pairing smoking with cutting, it asks readers to question which kinds of self-harm we notice, excuse or ignore, and it suggests that the habits we treat as ordinary may carry the same weight as the ones we find shocking. It also makes a point about empathy: pain is often hidden by people who look fine, and the people nearest to them may be hiding their own. Nothing in the text tells us who wrote it or why, and I won't guess. But the pen name "escape_artist," if it is a chosen handle, fits a poem about people who slip out of sight so skilfully that no one notices they need rescuing. The poem asks us to look at eyes as well as smiles.