Supermarket flowers are the kind you grab on the way past the checkout: cheap, quick, a little apologetic. The title gives us one of those bunches and then a gesture, flung from a windowsill, abrupt and final. The poem never mentions the flowers again. It turns inward instead and stays there for twelve lines of wishing, expecting and regretting. Who the flowers were for is left open, but the last line suggests the "you" at the centre of everything is the person they were meant for.
The poem is built from a very small stock of words. "Wished" appears four times in the first seven lines, then returns as "wish" in the final two, and the word «wished» also sits under the title like a label. "I expected" appears twice. All this repetition makes the speaker sound like someone going round in circles, saying the same sentence in slightly different ways in the hope that it will finally make sense. There is no rhyme and no regular rhythm. The lines are short, flat statements, closer to muttering than to singing. Even the questions at the end have no question marks, and the only punctuation in the whole poem is the full stop on the last line. That full stop turns "Why did I wish for you" into something closer to a verdict than an enquiry, as if the speaker already knows no answer is coming.
The central idea is a painful paradox: the speaker wished for rejection. The second line puts it most strangely: "the rejection that came with you." Rejection is described like a free gift bundled with a purchase, which, perhaps by accident, echoes the supermarket of the title. To want this person means accepting the rejection as part of the deal. Watch how the speaker gets there. "I expected that" leads to "I expected you to never talk to me again," which a few lines later becomes "I wished for that rejection." A fear has been rebranded as a desire. The poem suggests this is self-protection: if you expected the worst, or even chose it, it cannot ambush you.
That logic runs entirely inside the speaker's head. The other person never speaks. "You probably threw it away" is guesswork, yet two lines later the speaker claims "It was clear in your eyes that you'd reject me." The eyes are the only physical detail we get of the other person, and the speaker is reading them with great confidence. The single-word line "Obviously" lands like a bitter shrug, the speaker mocking their own certainty while still clinging to it. The "it" in "threw it away" is also unexplained. It might be a gift, or it might be the message the speaker hoped to send or receive. Either way, it echoes the title: the speaker throws flowers from a window and imagines the other person throwing something away in turn. Both are acts of discarding, and neither side seems able to hold on.
The windowsill matters too. It is the border between inside and outside, the place where people stand to wait. The long sixth line, "I expected you to never talk to me again and just leave me all alone again," sprawls where its neighbours are clipped. The doubled "again" hints that this loneliness is a pattern, not a one-off.
The ending is where the poem's armour cracks. The confident past-tense statements give way to questions: "What was I thinking," "Why did I wish for this," "Why did I wish for you." The target of the wish shifts from "this," the situation, to "you," the person, and rejection drops out of the sentence. Beneath all the bracing for impact is plain longing.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it uses to say so much. There are no elaborate metaphors, only a recognisable modern ache, waiting for a text, put into everyday speech. It is honest about self-sabotage and does not console the speaker or resolve anything. It simply lets one word, repeated until it loses its comfort, show how a person can talk themselves into expecting the very thing they dread.