Most love poems treat "forever" as the best thing one person can offer another. Here it is the one word the speaker cannot bear. The poem opens with that reversal ("Forever is a word I never want to hear") and spends the rest of its lines working out why. The answer is not really about time. It is about being brushed off by someone whose reassurance the speaker badly wants.
The title does a lot of the emotional work. "I Threw the Supermarket Flowers From the Windowsill" is a complete little story, and the poem never mentions flowers again. Supermarket flowers are the easy kind of gift, picked up with the shopping, and cut flowers are already dying. Judging by the title, they were meant as a gesture of affection, and the speaker has put them out of the room. Because the poem never says when this happens, the reader has to decide. It seems most likely to come after the unanswered question, as a delayed, silent reaction. That gap between title and text makes the anger feel held back rather than announced.
The word «forever», set in guillemets under the title, works like a label or a quotation, something handled at arm's length. It returns at the end as "'forever'" in quotation marks, so the poem is framed by the one word the speaker rejects. The closing plea, "Please tell me / But dont tell me 'forever'", asks for honesty and refuses the stock phrase in one breath. The speaker does not want a promise. She wants a real answer, which is harder to give.
The diction is plain and almost childlike. "Its scary and a really long time" is deliberately flat, and the flatness is convincing because the speaker doesn't dress the fear up. The poem is also open about its own defensive habits. "Normally I would go and say no and put my own self esteem down / I would probably change the subject / Or leave" describes a pattern of deflecting and shrinking. The irony arrives a few lines later, when the speaker asks, "'If I died what would you do?'" and gets what she herself would have given: "you changed the subject." She is on the receiving end of her own tactic, which may be why it stings so much.
That question is the hinge of the poem, and the only direct speech in it. It also contains a contradiction. The speaker fears "forever," yet she asks what happens when she is gone. Both are about how long she will matter to someone. She doesn't want a grand vow, but she does want proof that she would be missed. Just before the question, the poem slides from "you" to "no-one": "You wouldn't care really no-one would." The accusation widens from one person into a general feeling of being unimportant, and that is the real wound.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre, and the punctuation is almost absent. The only full stop falls after "changed the subject," as if the evasion had shut a door. The line lengths carry the feeling. "What does that mean?" is short and bare. Then comes one long, tumbling line: "Does that mean you just didnt want to answer it or did you feel like you couldn't for the answer that you would give". It has no pauses, and its clumsy ending ("for the answer that you would give") reads like a mind circling its worst guess, that the true answer would hurt. The small slips and missing apostrophes add to the sense of something typed quickly and left unpolished. The poem's honesty comes from that rawness.
What makes the poem worth reading is how precisely it captures a situation many people will recognise: wanting comfort, being met with silence, and not trusting the big words that might come instead. It also suggests that "forever" can be a way of avoiding the question rather than answering it. By the end, the speaker asks for something smaller and braver than eternity, which is a truthful reply.