Honesty usually sounds like a virtue, but in «honest» it feels more like a risk. The speaker keeps starting the same sentence, "if i was to be honest," and each time it opens onto a loss rather than a reward: "very few friends," no book, no cure. The grammar matters here. "If i was to be honest" is a hypothetical, so it quietly admits that honesty has been withheld. The speaker has been hiding something, and the poem is the place where that stops.
The first stanza builds this through accumulation. Short lines stack up like items on a list: "i'd have gotten help / i'd have been cured." Then comes a list of losses that narrows as it goes: "people / friends / family / him." It moves from the general to the intimate and ends on a single pronoun with no name, which suggests a wound too personal, or too raw, to explain. The poem never says who "him" is, and that gap is part of its power.
The second stanza lowers the tone on purpose. After the heavy losses, the speaker confesses ordinary faults: "i get jealous easily / i act like an asshole / i whine, bitch, and complain." The blunt, almost teenage vocabulary sounds like someone refusing to prettify herself or himself. The stanza closes on the flattest possible word, "imperfect," which reads as an anticlimax, as if the speaker is bracing for judgment and offering the smallest confession first.
Then the imagery turns more dramatic. The speaker is "crying from the inside out," which reverses the usual direction of grief and suggests pain that starts in hidden places and forces its way into view. The words are "pouring out" as a "tortured soul," "inscribed onto digital paper," a nice contradiction of old and new, since confession is an ancient impulse and the page here is a screen. The pain is "forever roaming around my orbit," an image of something circling and never landing. Orbit suggests a loop the speaker cannot leave, but it also suggests a fixed path, something that returns, which prepares for the ending.
The poem has no rhyme, almost no punctuation and no capital letters, not even for "i." That lowercase pronoun makes the speaker seem small, and the missing polish gives the poem the feel of a diary entry. Even the slip in "i want it all the end," with its missing word, looks unedited, as though the poem was left raw rather than tidied. The rhythm follows speech, with short, halting lines and enjambments that make the speaker seem to pause and decide whether to go on.
The real structure lies in the verb tenses. The poem moves from "if i was to be honest" to "if i had been honest" and finally to "if i am to be honest." The last version is the first one that is no longer hypothetical. At that point the speaker finally says what the earlier conditionals only hinted at: "i'm done." The final lines then turn on repetition: "i've made plans and decided / decided only because i'm being honest / i'm going to keep on." The doubled "decided" feels like a step taken twice, and the unpunctuated last line simply stops, with no neat closure. Honesty, which has cost the speaker so much, becomes the reason to stay. The speaker is scared, says so, and chooses to continue anyway. The phrase "made plans" is ambiguous, but the final line settles its direction.
That is what makes the poem significant. It does not promise a cure or a bright ending. Survival here is not a triumph but a decision, made and perhaps remade, and the poem treats the admission of despair and the choice to continue as parts of the same honest act. Nothing is known here about who wrote it beyond the pen name "french kisser," so the poem has to speak for itself, and it does so plainly. For readers who recognise these feelings in their own lives, the poem's lesson is also practical: saying the true thing aloud to someone you trust is where staying can begin.