Nobody in "Intensity" is allowed to get anything right. The poem is a single block of orders aimed at an unnamed "you", covering posture, facial expression, hair, clothes, feelings, morals and even hair colour. Its central idea is that the standards placed on a person, especially around appearance and behaviour, contradict one another so thoroughly that failure is guaranteed. The person is treated less as someone to listen to than as an object that is always slightly broken.
The construction mimics the pressure it describes. There are no stanza breaks, so the reader never gets a pause. Most lines are only two to five words long, and the imperative mood ("Stand up", "Fix your hair", "Wear glasses") hammers on like a drumbeat. There is no rhyme and no regular rhythm. The poem's music comes from repetition instead, mainly the recurring "Dont" and "Fix". The punctuation comes and goes, and the apostrophes are missing from "Dont", "Its" and "societys". Judging by the effect, this makes the voices seem rushed and overlapping, as if they were typed in a hurry by people who have said all this many times. The tag «Tall» under the title is never explained, but the opening command, "Stand up", may connect to it. That is only an inference from the text.
The poem escalates quietly. It begins with the body: posture, a face, a shirt. Then it turns personal in one cruel pivot: "Fix your shirt. / Its crooked. / Just like yourself." The complaint slides from clothing to character in a single line. "For crying out loud" is an everyday idiom, and it sits oddly close to the later "Dont cry". A few lines on, the phrasing hardens from "Dont laugh / Dont cry" to "You cannot have emotion." That is no longer advice about what to do. It is a flat denial that the person has an inner life.
The middle of the poem is where the logic collapses. "Dont wear makeup. / You need makeup. / You are prettier with makeup." gives a ban, a demand and a bribe in three lines. Even more chilling is "Dont bully. / Be honest. / You can do both." The speaker sounds calm and reasonable while saying something impossible. Two lines later come two paired traps, "Dont be sweet / You are a pushover" and "Dont be rude / You are heartless". Each rule arrives with its punishment already attached, and no middle ground is left standing between the two. The hair lines work the same way. "Dont be brunette / Dont be alburn" (presumably "auburn") ends on "Blondes do it best", which sounds like an advertising slogan, as though the voice is borrowed from the media. "Wear glasses. / Wear contacts. / More natural, the better" asks for artificial fixes and a natural look at once.
The ending is the most interesting move. After so many uses of "Fix" aimed at the person, the last two lines are "Fix societys wants. / Fit in societys wants." The verbs are nearly twins, but they pull apart. To "fix" a want could mean to satisfy it or to repair it, and "fit in" means to squeeze yourself into it. Either way, the only desires mentioned in the whole poem belong to "society". The "you" never gets a want of its own. The missing apostrophe in "societys wants" even makes the phrase look like a single clumsy lump of demand.
What makes the poem significant is how plainly it makes a familiar experience recognisable. The second-person address pulls the reader into the target's seat, so that anyone who has been told to be confident but not arrogant, or natural but polished, will hear their own life in these lines. The poem offers no resolution and no rebuttal, and it stops on yet another command. That leaves the protest unspoken and puts it in the reader's mind instead, which may be the strongest effect it has.