"For the record" is what people say when they feel misquoted, and that is the position the speaker takes from the first line. Someone has apparently seen dry eyes and assumed recovery, so the poem sets the facts straight: "I didn't stop crying over your loss, / I ran out of tears." The whole poem hangs on that distinction. Emptiness is not healing. The speaker is "as dry as a drought," and a drought is not the absence of water because the rain has been resolved, but the absence of water because there is none left. The central idea is that grief does not end when its outward signs do, and that "one doesn't forget a great love," however calm the surface looks.
The poem is built like a case being argued. Each of its three stanzas ends with a run of three similes, and the third simile in each is the same strange image: "a candle burning oxygen." A candle burning wax is the usual picture. Here the flame feeds on air, something invisible and constant, as if grief were quietly using up what the speaker needs to breathe. The line then changes with each stanza. First the candle is burning, then there is "the smoke from the candle," then "the drying wax." Flame, vapour, residue: the candle is going out, and the speaker still won't call that an ending. The loss only changes form.
The other similes work by contrast. "Debris from an earthquake" points to the aftermath rather than the disaster, to what stays on the ground after the shaking stops. "A glass half empty" turns a familiar cliché about optimism into a plain statement of lack, and it quietly links back to the opening drought. In the second stanza a "bird forced from it's nest" and a "balloon lost from the grip of the needy child" both describe something leaving that someone else wanted to keep. The word "needy" is revealing, because it puts the speaker in the child's place, the one left holding nothing.
The most interesting move comes between the second and third stanzas. Love is first described as something that traps: "They are trapped and strangled by it, / Until the noose is finally cut." You might expect the cutting of the noose to mean relief. The third stanza refuses that: "I'm not set free by my newly cut noose, / But I drown from it." The images shift from strangling to drowning to a "tether," and none of them offers a clean escape. The speaker has "lived my life on a tether" and "forgot how to stand on my own." So the loss hurts twice, once for the person gone and once for the self that depended on them. The final similes fit this. A baby learning to walk is unsteady and starting again, and "a tree falling in the forest" recalls the old riddle about a fall nobody witnesses, which suits a grief nobody seems to understand.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no regular rhyme or metre. Its pull comes from repetition: the opening phrase "For the record," the matching triplets of similes, and the recurring candle. The lines vary in length, and the long one about the tether, "I have lived my life on a tether so I forgot how to stand on my own," runs on without a pause, as if the thought has tangled the speaker up. Against that, the short flat lines "Period," and then the lone "Period." that ends the poem work like a gavel. The speaker is closing the argument and refusing to be contradicted. A few slips on the page ("dessert" for desert, "it's" for its) show the poem's roughness, but they don't blunt its directness.
The poem matters because it says plainly something many people feel and few can explain: that others read composure as recovery. It also complicates the usual picture of love and loss by suggesting that devotion can become dependence, so that losing someone means losing balance as well. Because the poem never says how the "you" is gone, it can speak to many kinds of loss. And its last word, "Period.", is not comfort. It is a refusal to pretend.