The flowers in the title never appear in the poem itself. The title gives us one concrete, slightly violent action, cheap supermarket flowers flung from a window, and the lines that follow contain no objects at all, only feeling. The subtitle, «I thought I knew, but I didn't», sits between the two like a hinge. We are never told who the flowers were for or why they were thrown, so any story is inference. But the gap invites us to read the poem as the explanation for the gesture, or as what is left once the gesture is over.
The central idea is simple and painfully familiar: confidence is no match for another person. The opening lines show this by deflating the speaker's certainty as it speaks. "I thought I knew" is total. "I thought I had it planned" is slightly smaller, a matter of organisation. By the third line the claim has shrunk to "I thought that maybe one thing is going to plan." That is one thing, hedged with "maybe," and the grammar stumbles along with it. The speaker is already losing their grip before the blunt "I was wrong" arrives, a line short enough to feel like a door closing.
Then the pronoun changes. Until now every sentence began with "I." Now it is "You came along," and "came along" is a wonderfully casual phrase, as unplanned as someone wandering into a room. "Everything changed" is huge and flat, with no detail to cushion it. What follows is physical rather than poetic: "hot faced," "blushing." These are not elegant words like "flushed" or "radiant." They sound awkward and embarrassed, which makes them believable. The body gives the speaker away.
The most interesting moment is the short list that follows: "Every smile / Every laugh / Every everything." The first two items are specific, but the third is not. "Every everything" gives up on description, and the poem lets it. The speaker can't itemise what happened because it was bigger than any plan or list could hold. The word also has a childlike, breathless quality, like someone talking too fast to choose their words. Notably, "I" has vanished from these lines. The feeling has taken over the sentence.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation. The lines are uneven and close to speech, and they run on a single breath, with no full stops to steady them. The only music comes from repetition. "Plan," "planned" and "planned" circle back through the poem, and "I thought I knew" opens it and returns near the end. The second time, though, "But" has been added, and the same words now sound like a confession rather than a boast. The poem has the shape of a loop, but the speaker is not the person they were at the start.
The ending is the most deliberate part. "I thought I planned and I didn't" compresses the idea almost to the point of broken grammar, and then "I didn't" is repeated alone on the last line. It can be read in several ways: as insistence, as the speaker persuading themselves, or as a voice trailing off. The poem refuses to tidy up. It stops where the planning stops.
Looking back at the title, the irony sharpens. Supermarket flowers are about the least planned gift there is, grabbed on the way past, and a windowsill is a threshold between inside and outside. Whether the throwing is anger, heartbreak or release, the poem doesn't say. The past tense of "I thought" suggests the speaker is already on the far side of the events, and the blushing is a memory.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty. It uses only the plainest vocabulary and makes no attempt to sound wise about being wrong. Its force comes from that restraint, and from the way a few repeated words can show a person finding out that they never had control.