Loneliness is usually described in long, aching sentences. Jay Mortimer's "Silly Rhymes" does the opposite: it shrinks. The lines are short, the words plain, and the speaker keeps whittling a thought down until one word is left: "friends?", "no?", "alone." The central idea is that being alone means more than the absence of people. It is also the loss of a kind of play, the "silly rhymes" of earlier times, which the speaker misses and cannot find again.
The first two stanzas work like dwindling echoes. "it is lonely here / with no friends near" sets up a tidy rhyme. Then "no friends" repeats the complaint, and "friends?" turns the word into a question, as if the speaker doubts it still means anything. The second stanza repeats the move with "no one" and "no?" Each time the pattern runs from statement to repetition to doubt, and the lines get shorter as the certainty drains out. The page begins to look as empty as the room the speaker describes.
The refrain "i contemplate times / that had silly rhymes / i miss them so / where did they go?" appears twice, word for word, and it holds the poem's central irony. The poem is itself built on rhyme (near/here, else/myself, times/rhymes, so/go), so it mourns silliness using the very tool it mourns. But the rhymes no longer sound playful. They ring like an echo in an empty hall. The verb "contemplate" is stiff and grown-up beside the sing-song rhythm, and it suggests a speaker who now stands outside the cheerful past, studying it rather than living in it. "where did they go?" has a child's bluntness, and nobody answers it. Repeating the question later makes the thinking feel circular, which is how thoughts behave when there is no one to interrupt them.
The fourth stanza shows how carefully the poem handles its form. The opening line returns, "it is lonely here," but its partner is now "because i'm alone," and the rhyme is gone. The sound pattern collapses at the moment the speaker tries to explain the feeling, and the explanation goes nowhere: lonely because alone. It is a loop, not an insight. The stanza then thins out to "i'm alone" and finally "alone." with a full stop, a flat ending after all the question marks.
Then the poem does something unexpected and names a time: "i want to forget / this October." It never says what happened, and that restraint matters. We are given the wish to forget but not the thing to be forgotten. Judging by the imagery of the month, autumn may suggest endings, but the poem leaves the reader to decide. What follows is a quick tightening: "it's nearly over / it's over / OVER." The capitals make this the only shouted moment in a poem otherwise set in quiet lowercase, where even the "i" stays small. The word could signal relief, grief, or both. The month may be ending, or something larger may be.
The closing stanza turns on a contradiction. "i want to forget" is followed at once by "i'll remember," which is no longer a wish but a prediction. The speaker knows the memory will come back exactly "when i'm alone," when nothing else is there to crowd it out. The poem then ends on the word it has been circling all along, "alone," and it gives the reader no comfort.
What makes the poem worth attention is how closely its form matches its feeling. Repetition becomes a trap the speaker can't leave, shrinking lines become emptiness, and the broken rhyme becomes a small crack in the music. Rhyme is both the thing the speaker misses and the way the poem is made, so the loss is built into the lines as well as described. A reader doesn't need elaborate metaphors to feel it. Simple words, placed carefully and repeated until they lose their comfort, are enough.