The title does something the poem itself never manages: it acts. "I Threw the Supermarket Flowers From the Windowsill" is in the past tense and describes a decisive, almost violent gesture. Supermarket flowers are the cheap, last-minute kind, bought on the way somewhere, and flinging them out of a window suggests anger, grief, or a need to be rid of something. After that, the flowers never appear again. The poem below is made entirely of conditionals, a list of things the speaker did not or could not do. The gap between the title's one act and the body's long run of "if only" is where the poem lives.
On the surface it seems to be two poems braided together. One strand is about losing someone: "If only I could remember the small details / If only I could remember the things you said," and later the missed chance at "a proper goodbye." The text never says whether "you" has died or simply gone, so it is safer to say only that something has ended and memory is already slipping. The other strand is social fear: the bullies, the crush, the opinions that get mocked. What joins them is the line "be me in front of everyone else like I do in front of you." The speaker seems to have had one person in front of whom they could be themselves. Losing that person means losing the only place where that self felt safe, and I think that is the poem's central idea.
The construction is simple and effective. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, so the rhythm comes from repetition. Nearly every line opens with "If only," like a chant or a worry repeated at night. The lines also grow and shrink. The early ones are quiet and short, but the middle ones sprawl. In "stand in front of my crush and not shout something stupid and wave my hands in the air and run away," the chain of "and"s makes the sentence flail the way the speaker's body does. It is funny, but the humour looks like a defence, a way of laughing at yourself before anyone else can.
Small word choices carry a lot. "Me" is the pivot of the poem: "be me" appears twice, and the word comes back in a much sadder place. The fantasy of beating the bullies is to "make them seem smaller and more of a loser than me." Even in an imagined victory, the speaker accepts "loser" as a label for themselves, and the comparison only shifts who is slightly worse. The verb "flaunt" is also telling. The speaker doesn't just want to be accepted but to show off who they are, which suggests how much of themselves is currently kept hidden. "Proper goodbye" has a childlike, almost polite ring, as if goodbyes had correct forms, and the missed hug is what stops this one from being completed. The slip in "to scared" (for "too scared") may be an accident, but it leaves the poem feeling unpolished and written in one rush, which suits its subject.
The ending is the strongest move. After the longest, most detailed wishes, the poem shrinks to "If only" and "If only," two lines with nothing after them. The phrase has lost its object, as though the speaker no longer needs to say what they are wishing for, because the wanting itself is the whole feeling. There is no "but" and no consolation, and the white space does the work of silence.
The poem matters because it refuses to rank its sorrows. A funeral-sized loss and an embarrassing moment in front of a crush sit on the same list, and that is how a mind overwhelmed by feeling often works. Judging by the bullies and the crush, the voice is a young one, and it gets something true about being young: grief and self-consciousness arrive together. The poem's honesty is plain and unguarded, and many readers will recognise it.