Most poems about bullying look outward, at the kid in the corridor or the message on the screen. "bully pt.1," signed french kisser, seems to promise the same thing. It opens with a mother's question, "did i have a bully?", and the speaker's answer, "of course i do," has the flat weariness of someone who has been asked many times. The bully is "everywhere / always taunting me." Seven stanzas go by before the last line shows that the reader has been walking in the wrong direction.
The construction makes that trick work. The poem is eight quatrains of short, lowercase lines, with almost no punctuation until the last stanza. The early stanzas rely on repetition ("i have a bully at school / i have a bully at home") and then on lists of places: the shower, dinner, the store, class, the grass. The list keeps widening, and the clue sits inside it. "Even when i'm with friends / or even alone" is the first moment that doesn't fit, because a bully who is present when you are alone can't be an ordinary classmate. Once she follows the speaker into the shower, the poem is quietly admitting she isn't standing anywhere in the room.
The sound is worth a closer look. The poem is mostly free verse, but rhyme appears in small bursts: "store" and "bored," "class" and "grass," "there" and "everywhere." These chimes are bouncy, almost like a playground chant, which suits a taunt. They also turn dull settings, a shop or a lawn, into places where the bully can strike. The cheerful sound sits uneasily against the grim content, and that unease helps the poem.
Rhythm also carries the sense of exhaustion. In "when i cry / sing / or dance," the verbs sit alone on their lines, so the reader has to pause between them. The list moves from sadness to pleasure, and the poem's point is that neither is safe. The following stanza stretches the time frame to "my final breath." The speaker even tries the polite thing: "i tell her goodbye / but she never leaves." The line is almost comically ordinary, as if the bully were a guest who overstays, and that makes it sadder.
The turn comes with "i only see her in mirrors." This quietly contradicts the earlier "she's there always," since she is constant but visible only in reflection. The detail answers the mother's question in a way no teacher could act on, because no one can be sent to the office. The target is broken across three lines, "my body / soul / and mind." Each word gets its own blow, and "soul," alone in the middle, is the shortest and most exposed. The last stanza falters on purpose. "Always / always" repeats like an echo, then comes the hesitant "because, well," as if the speaker is saying the sentence aloud for the first time. The revelation, "she's me...", trails off into an ellipsis instead of ending with a full stop. Notice, too, that the poem keeps the pronoun "she" for the bully all the way through. The speaker never says "I" and "myself" together until the confession, so the split between the two selves is built into the grammar.
The poem matters because of what it does with a familiar word. "Bully" usually belongs to schoolyards and has rules attached: tell someone, report it, move away. Here the word is applied to self-criticism, and the poem shows that the habits of a bully, being constant, mocking and impossible to escape, can live inside a person. From the references to school, home and a mother's questions, the voice sounds young, though that is an inference, not a fact about the writer. The plain, conversational language makes the idea easy to recognize, and a reader who knows that inner voice may feel less alone.
The title adds a final note. "pt.1" suggests the story continues, but this part offers no rescue and no advice. It stops at the moment of recognition, which may be the honest place to stop. Naming the bully comes first, and the poem leaves what to do about her for later.