A father's leaving is the wound at the centre of halez's «abandonded», and the poem never looks away from it. The speaker addresses an absent parent, first with accusation ("how could you? / I trusted you"), then with pleading, then with a bitter sarcasm that turns out to be the most revealing register of all. The poem's central idea is that abandonment is not a single event but a slow structural failure. What a child loses at nine, judging by the poem's own arithmetic ("its been 8 years / im now seventeen"), she goes on losing as she grows.
The poem builds this idea through three connected images. The first is darkness. The father was a light ("now your light isnt there"), and without him the speaker drifts in a "dark sea." Then comes a joke: "Man i shouldve bought a lamp." The slangy "Man" and the shrug are a defence, a way of making the loss sound small. It doesn't work, and the next lines flatten into "No light, no happiness, only pain / Well pain and me." The verb "bask" is a good example of the poem's irony. Basking belongs to sunlight, and here it is pain that she lies in, the only warmth left.
The second image is the ledge, and it carries the poem's real argument. She clings to a "thin ledge" that is "cracking as i grow / for it is too weak without you." The ledge seems to stand for whatever support her father once gave her. It was never built to hold a growing person, so every year of life adds weight to something already damaged. The list "8,10,12,15,16?" then reads like a guess at how long a structure can last, and the question mark makes it uneasy. By the time she says "im now seventeen," the guessing has run out. The third image grows from the second: the ledge becomes a building, and the building becomes a "fallen building" with a "memorial." The poem moves from drifting, to hanging on, to imagining her own collapse.
The rhythm and the voice do as much work as the images. There is no rhyme scheme and no steady metre. Lines run from three words ("you left me") to long, breathless statements, and the lowercase "i," loose punctuation and trailing dots make it sound like thought written down as it happens. That unpolished surface is part of the effect. The voice also keeps shifting age. Mid-poem she suddenly sounds like a small child: "daddy please stop these demons / the meanies are hurting your little girl / where-o-where is my superman?" The nursery-rhyme "where-o-where" and the babyish "meanies" set the pain of the inner voices against a child's vocabulary. The years of loss seem to have frozen part of her at the age when he left. Then the voice snaps back to a seventeen-year-old counting years.
The ending is the most unsettling part, and its tone is the hardest to pin down. "i kind of want the relief" is quiet and offhand, which makes it more alarming than a dramatic cry would be. The superman image returns with a sting: "or will you just be there a second late / late, as always / you never were that punctual..." Here the lamp joke's dark humour has hardened into anger. The last lines imagine him arriving "on time for the memorial" and then perhaps not being "allowed in." It is hard to say whether this is revenge, grief, or both, and the trailing ellipsis leaves it open.
What makes the poem significant is its honesty about how long a hurt can last, and how it can look like sarcasm, humour or toughness on the surface. Its roughness is part of its force. A more polished poem might have tidied the contradictions between blame and longing, or between joking and despair, but here they sit side by side. The poem also deserves to be read seriously. Its hints about wanting relief are real distress on the page, and anyone who recognises these feelings in themselves should tell someone they trust.