The title of "Would've Been" is a grammatical ghost. It names something that never got the chance to exist, and in the second stanza the speaker claims it as an identity: "I'm a would've been, / Should've been, / Never was, / And never ever will be." The lines shrink as they go, each one stripping away a little more possibility until only a flat negative remains. A whole relationship, and the future it promised, is squeezed into two conditional verbs, a "never was" and a "never ever."
The situation is clear from the opening command. Someone who has left is now trying to return with comforting words, and the speaker won't have them. "Don't whisper in my ear, / The sweet things you did before" turns on that last word. Past kindness no longer comforts, because it only measures what has been lost. The verdict on the whispering is "Nothing practical to hear," a dry, almost bitter phrase, as if tenderness without action is just noise. Then comes the poem's central image: lies "Pouring from your mouth like the blood in my heart." The simile is a little tangled, which suits the emotion. Blood means life, yet here it is the vehicle for deceit, so the lies seem to be what once kept the speaker going, and what now bleeds them. The blood motif returns in "Twas the first lie you bled," and "bled" finds its rhyming partner across the stanza break in "I might as well be dead." The sound links the wound to its consequence.
Body imagery carries the third stanza. "Leaving my side" works twice, as the place where a partner stood and as a flank that must now be "sewn up with the thread of threads." That phrase borrows the grand pattern of "king of kings," so the stitching sounds enormous, perhaps impossible. The injury also reaches the speaker's movement: "you made me lose my confident stride." From there the poem is full of walking and falling. The speaker is "turned away," has "No where to turn," and finally describes how "no one helped me when I fell." The stride at the start of the stanza and the fall at the end make a small story of collapse.
The fourth stanza is the shortest and the most startling. "I was turned away at heaven, / And locked right out of hell" puts the speaker in limbo, refused by both extremes. Being denied even hell is the sharpest touch, because it suggests a pain too shapeless to be punished or rewarded. It is the "would've been" idea again, this time in religious terms: not good enough to be saved, not even dramatic enough to be damned. Notice too that "heaven" is left without a rhyme while "hell" and "fell" clang together, so the sound mirrors the plunge.
The final stanza changes direction. "You can't shout in the water / With out getting liquid in your lungs" sounds like a rule of nature, and the "you" now seems more general, perhaps the speaker talking to themself. Drowning would "lessen the pain of slaughter," yet it would "kill the joy of release." The violence of "slaughter" next to the strange word "joy" shows a mind weighing relief against its cost. The ending, "look ahead and shut your eyes, / Finally save the peace," can be read in more than one way. It might mean refusing to look back and protecting one's calm, or it might hint at something darker, a longing for oblivion. Judging by the text, the poem leaves both possibilities open rather than choosing, and "save," with its sense of preserving something fragile, adds to the unease.
Formally the poem is loose. Line lengths swing from the clipped "Never was" to the long, tumbling "Which has to be sewn up with the thread of threads." Rhymes appear (ear/hear, side/stride, hell/fell, release/peace) but arrive irregularly, and "water" and "slaughter" only half match. The voice mixes spoken shortcuts like "'Cause" and the missing "that" in "Don't tell you still care for me" with the old-fashioned "Twas." Even the split spellings, "good byes," "No where," "With out," seem to pull the words apart, and "good byes" in particular turns one farewell into a series. Whether deliberate or not, these rough edges keep the speech raw rather than polished.
The poem's value lies less in originality of subject than in how well it finds a name for a familiar ache. "A would've been" is a compact, memorable way to say that heartbreak mourns what might have been as much as what was, and the speaker's refusal to be consoled gives that grief its force.