"I like to think of relationships / as candy." The opening phrase "I like to think" sounds offhand, but it also sounds like a choice, even a defence. If relationships are candy, losing one is no tragedy, only a sweet that ran out. The rest of "Candies" tests whether that comfort holds up.
We know the poet only by the handle escape_artist, and no date comes with the poem, so the text is all there is to work with. It rewards a close look. The speaker sorts relationships into two kinds. The first are forgettable: candies that "look the same / or taste the same / or just don't last long." The repetition of "the same," split across short lines, makes the sameness something you hear as well as read. These relationships blur together, and the little word "just" in "just don't last long" is a shrug. The colon after "long" is odd, because it promises an explanation and delivers a contrast instead. It reads like a speaker thinking aloud, changing direction mid-thought.
The second kind is more interesting: "huge jaw-breakers / that numb you with each lick." "Huge" suggests intensity and investment, while "jaw-breaker" hides a threat inside a sweet. The name itself talks about damage. "Numb" is the sharpest word in the poem. It suggests that the relationships which last longest are not the happiest but the ones that gradually deaden feeling. "Each lick" stretches the process out, one repeated, patient action after another. The first group of candies fails by being dull, and this one fails by dulling you. Neither is satisfying, and the poem offers no third option.
Time is the poem's real subject, and one word tracks it. "Last" appears three times in four lines: "don't last long," "last a while," "don't last forever." The scale widens from long to a while to forever, but it ends in the same failure. Even the biggest, hardest candy runs out. The final line, "like the package says they will," lands after the hinge word "but" and trails off without a full stop. The "package" stands for an outside voice that makes promises, whether advertising, stories, or expectation. The speaker's complaint is aimed less at the candy than at the label. Relationships are sold with a guarantee of forever that nothing in the experience supports.
The poem is free verse with no end rhyme, and its only echoes are repetitions: "the same" twice, "last" three times. A poem about disappointment may sensibly avoid the neat click of rhyme. The line lengths shift, from the blunt "as candy." to the longer, more deflated closing line. The pronouns shift as well. The "I" appears once, in the first line, and after that the speaker retreats into "you," as if speaking from a general rule rather than a personal wound. There is also a question of perspective. Candy is something you consume, so the other people in these relationships become objects, tasted and finished with. Readers can take this as a wry, protective coping strategy or as a slightly unflattering self-portrait, a speaker who treats people as products. The poem doesn't say which, and that ambiguity is part of its interest.
The diction is childish ("candies," "lick") while the subject is adult, and the gap produces a bittersweet humour. A sweetshop image makes heartbreak sound almost trivial, until "numb" and "jaw-breaker" suggest it isn't.
That is where the poem's significance lies. In about a dozen lines it takes a small, familiar comparison and pushes it until it turns sour. It points out how often we borrow the language of shopping and packaging to talk about love: things we pick, use, and expect to last as advertised. It also refuses a tidy lesson. There is no moral and no consoling final turn, only the broken promise. What the reader does with that is left open, and a reader can finish the poem unsure whether the speaker is wise or just hurt.