Seven short lines hold a whole relationship: the charm, the betrayal and the slow dawning of understanding. The poem never raises its voice. Its two key admissions arrive wrapped in the same shrug, "I guess", and that shrug carries more feeling than a long complaint could.
The subject is simple. Someone is charmed by a person who knows exactly what that charm can do. The first half belongs to him: "He had the type of smile / That you could get mesmerised by." The pronouns shift here. "He" is specific, but "you" is general, as if the speaker were describing a trick that would work on anybody. It reads like a small act of self-defence. Then "And I guess I did" pulls the focus back to one person who admits to being caught. "Mesmerised" is a precise choice, a word with hypnosis in its history. It suggests a trance, something done to you rather than something you decide. The smile is a force, not just a feature.
Line four is the hinge: "And he used that against me." It is flat, with no adjective and no exclamation mark. "Used" and "against" turn the smile from a gift into a tool, even a weapon. The line also gives no details. The missing explanation makes the hurt feel either too obvious to spell out or too sore to touch.
The second half mirrors the first. "He had the type of smile" becomes "But I had the type of heart." The repeated "type of" is everyday speech, the way people sort each other ("he's just that type"), and here the speaker sorts them both: he is a charmer, I am a believer. The pairing cuts two ways. It makes the story feel like a lock meeting its key, but it also sounds fatalistic, as if neither could have acted differently. The choice of "heart" over "mind" matters too. Believing, for this speaker, was a matter of feeling, not a decision to be fooled. And "all the lies" is the only place where deception is named outright. Until then it was only implied by "used that against me". The word "all" hints at a long run of them, each swallowed in turn.
The sound of the poem is quiet but deliberate. There is no rhyme scheme and no regular metre. The lines sit on small, unemphatic words like "by" and "me", and the stranded preposition in "get mesmerised by" is how people actually talk. That keeps the poem closer to a confession than a performance. Yet a pattern runs underneath. The long "i" sound chimes through "type", "smile", "mesmerised", "by", "I" and "lies", linking the charm, the speaker and the deceit in one echo. Three lines begin with "And" (lines three, four and seven), so events pile up like a story told in one breath, with nothing argued or resolved. The single "But" in line five is the poem's only real pivot, the point where the focus moves from him to the speaker.
Then there is the repeated "I guess". It closes each half of the poem in a short, falling line, almost a verbal sigh. The first time, "I guess I did", the speaker admits to being taken in. The second time, in the final line, the effect is sadder. "I guess he knew" is something the speaker can never confirm, because they can only guess what was in his head. The phrase can be read as a mask of calm, a way of sounding unbothered. It can also be read as leftover doubt, from someone still trying to work out how much was deliberate. Since "I guess" is also the title, the whole poem is framed by hedging. The ending is not anger but a realisation that sounds almost like a question.
The poem is worth reading for that restraint. It blames and forgives at the same time: he used the smile, but the speaker also sees their own part in the story, without drowning in self-pity. Many readers will recognise the feeling of looking back and realising that being charmed and being fooled were the same thing. The name attached to the poem, escape_artist, makes an interesting counterpoint to a speaker who feels caught, though that is a pairing for the reader to notice, not a claim about intent. What stays with you is how much the poem leaves unsaid, and how a phrase as casual as "I guess" can hold so much hurt.