Gabe's «LIFE» is only thirteen lines long, yet it passes through three distinct moods: accusation, confession and a tentative kind of comfort. Its central idea is that the first step out of pain is saying honestly that you are in it. It also suggests that one person's rejection is not the measure of a whole life.
The opening stanza is a scolding. Two questions begin with the same words, "Why do you keep on", and the repetition makes the speaker sound weary, as if this conversation has happened many times. "Chasing" suggests someone running after something that keeps getting away. "Lying" is the more interesting word, because it can mean telling falsehoods or lying down in defeat. Either way, the person addressed pretends to be fine when they are "not alright." Then comes the stanza's turn: "Nobody wants you / But I want you." The two lines are almost identical, with only the subject swapped, and that swap does the work. "Nobody" is a huge, crushing word, but the speaker's single "I" contradicts it. Nobody cannot be true if one person exists who wants you. The poem never says who "you" is. Given the later line "I hurt myself," it is plausible, though only an inference, that the speaker is talking to a part of themselves.
The second stanza switches to dialogue, and the pronouns shift. Other people ask "Who hurt you?", a question that expects a villain. The reply refuses to supply one: "I hurt myself." The word "you" has appeared again and again at the ends of lines, and here it finally turns into "myself." The reply also contrasts with stanza one. There, "you" was accused of lying about not being alright. Here the speaker answers the same question truthfully: "No, I'm not ok." The words are blunt and one-syllable, with no decoration. "I hurt myself" could mean self-blame, self-sabotage or something more literal. The poem does not specify, and that restraint lets readers bring their own understanding without being told what to feel.
The poem has no rhyme scheme and no steady metre. It moves like speech, in short lines that stop where a breath or a hesitation would fall. Rhyme is replaced by echo. "Wants you" and "want you" answer each other across two lines, and "you" returns at the end of "Who hurt you?" The vowel of "you" is faintly heard again in "choose" in the final stanza. Punctuation also changes across the poem. Stanza one has question marks, stanza two has quotation marks and the stiffness of reported speech, and stanza three drops punctuation altogether, along with the words "I" and "you." Its three lines are impersonal and calm, like something said once the shouting has stopped.
The verbs trace a quiet progression: "chasing," "lying," "hurt," and finally "choose." The first words describe compulsion, while the last suggests agency. "It's just a person" works by deflation. The small word "just" shrinks the thing that has been taking up the whole sky, and it suggests that the "chasing" was after a particular person who did not want to be caught. "There's more to choose" turns that shrinking into possibility. Then "Good things take time" arrives as a proverb, a deliberately plain sentence of the kind people say to comfort each other. Standing at the end of a poem about hurt, it reads less like a slogan than like a small promise the speaker is trying to believe.
The title, «LIFE», is set in guillemets, the quotation marks used in some languages, as though the word were being held at arm's length. The word never appears in the poem itself, so the title asks readers to decide what counts as life here. A reasonable answer is everything the poem contains: the chase, the pretending, the honest answer and the waiting.
The poem's significance lies in its plainness. It uses no elaborate metaphors and no grand vocabulary, only the sentences people really say and hear: "Are you ok?" and "No." The final comfort arrives quickly, and some readers may find it too neat. Yet its flatness feels honest, like someone talking themselves round one sentence at a time. The poem shows that telling the truth about being hurt, and then refusing to let that hurt be the last word, can be a brave act.