The title promises a poem about hatred, but the first line gives the game away: "I hate that I still love you." Before the poem has properly begun, hate has become the language the speaker uses to talk about love. What follows looks like a list of grievances, but look at what is on it: "blue eyes or brown hair," "your beautiful smile," the days when the two "used to non stop talk." These are not the complaints of someone who has stopped caring. They are details a person notices only after looking for a very long time. The speaker is cataloguing a beloved while pretending to prosecute an enemy.
The central idea is that hate makes a poor shield. The speaker reaches for the biggest, simplest word available, and it keeps breaking in their hands. "I hate your beautiful smile" is the clearest case. The adjective smuggles in a compliment, and the line becomes a complaint and a tribute at once. The smile isn't the problem because it is ugly. It is the problem because it is lovely and, as the earlier line puts it, the person is now "with her."
The construction is simple and effective. Eight lines in a row open with the same two words, a drumbeat of anaphora that feels like someone repeating a rule to convince themselves. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, so the rhythm comes from that repetition and from the uneven line lengths. Short lines like "I hate seeing you around" land as flat statements. Longer ones, like the memory of how "we used to non stop talk then you started ignoring me," spill past the pattern, as if the story behind the grievance can't be squeezed into a tidy refrain. The order is not logical either. The list jumps from appearance to memory to jealousy to online life, which feels less like an argument being built than a mind circling the same spot.
The details of modern social life make the poem sharper. "I hate how you haven't noticed I blocked you" is a small, painful contradiction. Blocking is meant to be a way of leaving, yet the speaker is hurt that nobody registered it. The act was a message with no reader. The next line, "I hate when you tag me in pictures," suggests the other person still brushes against the speaker's life, though the poem doesn't explain how this fits with the block. That gap may be part of the truth it captures, since cutting someone off and wanting to be noticed by them can happen at the same time. The rival is never named either. She is only "her," a pronoun, which shrinks her to the role she plays in the speaker's pain. The unpolished spelling ("your with her") and the casual phrasing keep the voice close to a typed message rather than a crafted lyric, which adds to the rawness.
The last line is where the poem breaks its own pattern. It is indented, much longer, and has no punctuation: "I hate when you do everything you do but for some damn reason I can't hate you." This is the turn, and it is a confession of failure. After eight lines of declared hatred, the speaker admits it never worked. Then the line runs on through a chain of "and"s: "and I hate that and I hate this and I hate myself." The targets get vaguer ("that," "this"), as though the speaker can no longer name what hurts, and then they swing inward. Hatred that was aimed outward for the whole poem lands on the speaker. The poem ends on "myself," and in doing so it completes a circle that began with hating the love and now ends with hating the self for feeling it.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a feeling that rarely has tidy words. It offers no wisdom, no recovery and no closure. It captures the gap between what we say we feel and what we do, and its repetitive, almost chant-like form mimics how thoughts loop when we can't let someone go. The signature, ja.xx, reads like an online handle, and the poem needs nothing more than its own words to be understood.