Nobody asks the strong-looking person whether it hurts. Izzy's "This Isn't Right" pushes against that assumption. The speaker describes absorbing "slaps and punches" while others decided, judging by appearance, that this person could take it. The central idea is that appearance can become a trap. To seem strong is to be treated as if pain doesn't register, and to seem dangerous is to be feared rather than protected. The poem never says who "they" are or where this happens, so it reads as one person's story and as something more general.
The tension runs through the word "appearance," which appears twice with two different meanings. First the speaker wants "to live up to my appearance," so strength is a role to perform, and the result is that the speaker "only tortured myself in the process." Later comes "People see me as dangerous / Cause of my appearance." The surface is the same, but now it is read as a threat. Either way, people look at the outside and stop looking. That is why the poem keeps circling the act of seeing: "They didn't see the bruises they left," "They didn't see me dying inside." Bruises are visible and still go unnoticed, while dying inside is invisible by nature. The grievance is as much about a failure of attention as about violence.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse with no regular rhyme scheme, no stanza breaks and almost no punctuation beyond apostrophes. The lines are short and plain, closer to speech than to song, and each ends roughly where a breath would. The single block gives no pause to catch up in, which suits a speaker who has been given none. The only real "rhyme" is repetition. "Right" ends the fourth line and returns as the last word of the poem, so the argument is stated early and then comes back, like a thought the speaker cannot stop having.
The grammar of those early lines is revealing. "Though they did it thinking I could take it / Doesn't make it right" has a "Though" clause but no subject for "Doesn't." The sentence reads as spoken thought, bending a little under the feeling behind it. The tenses shift too. The first half is mostly past ("tried," "wanted," "tortured"), the language of looking back. At "I'm able to but I don't," the poem moves into the present: "People see," "They think," "I allow." The speaker is not describing something finished.
Another small word does a lot of work: "only." It appears three times, and each use shifts. "Only tortured myself" means nothing but harm. "Only someone who doesn't understand" dismisses the critics who say it was the speaker's fault. Then "I only want to love" is the plainest line in the poem. After being seen as dangerous, the speaker offers a motive of almost childlike simplicity, and it is disarming because it is so unguarded. The poem also saves its harshest word for this moment. "Abuse" arrives only in "That's why I allow them to abuse me," after the gentler "slaps and punches." The poem seems to name what happened only once it has explained the speaker's reasons.
The reasoning is uncomfortable, and the poem does not hide that. The speaker answers the advice to "stand up for myself" by claiming that not fighting back is a choice. Yet the ending depends on waiting: "wait for the day they stop and think." Waiting has no deadline. The final words, "This isn't right," are the thought the speaker hopes will occur to the abusers, and they are also the poem's own verdict, since they give it its title. The poem ends before that day arrives, so the hope stays open and unproven.
The poem matters because of what it refuses. It refuses the idea that someone who looks tough must be fine. It refuses the easy blame of "it was my fault." It does this in everyday words rather than elaborate metaphor, and that plainness is part of its force. A reader finishes with a sharper sense of how a "strong" front can hide a person who is hurting, and of how easily others stop at the surface.