A bunch of supermarket flowers goes out of the window before the poem has even started. Judging by the title, someone has refused a small, shop-bought attempt at cheerfulness. The flowers never appear in the poem itself, and that gap is part of its effect. We come in after the gesture has been thrown away and are left to work out what kind of mood does that.
The poem's opening line is a wish: "I wish I were a butterfly." The speaker reaches for "a beautiful and majestic creature", a phrase that sounds a little borrowed, like a caption under a nature photograph. It is how butterflies are supposed to be talked about, and the speaker wants to be admired in that way. Then the poem turns on the butterflies themselves: "they don't realize / they don't realize the pain that we are in." The repeated phrase works like a stammer. The speaker starts the sentence, can't finish it, and starts again, which makes the hurt feel unrehearsed.
The middle of the poem is built on repetition. "They see us when we are happy" sets up a contrast, and then "they see us when we are sad / they see us when we are crying / they see us when we are alone at three am and we are a mess" builds up in a list. The lines grow longer and less polished as they go. By the third, the tidy vocabulary of "majestic" has given way to the blunt, everyday "a mess." The specific hour matters too. Three am is when the night is quietest and loneliness is hardest to avoid, and moths are, of course, creatures of the night. The poem never says so, but the choice of insect fits the hour.
The only voice besides the speaker's is the moths', in single quotation marks: "'I'm here for you, I know how you feel'". It is plain and a bit worn, the kind of thing people actually say, and the poem gives it weight by letting it stand alone. Straight afterwards the speaker corrects themselves. "its like they know" is a simile, but the next line drops the hedge: "they know how we feel its because they have been there." The comfort of the moths comes from experience, not from beauty or advice. They understand because they have been through it themselves.
None of this is held together by rhyme. The poem is free verse with almost no punctuation, and it reads like speech that hasn't been tidied up, with "its" missing its apostrophe and ideas running into each other. That looseness suits a speaker who is too worn out to polish anything. The one place where the poem tightens is the close: "moths are the sad side of butterflies / and butterflies are the happy side of moths." The two lines mirror each other, swapping the same words, and the symmetry insists that these are not two different creatures. They are two moods of one being. Then the poem steps down to its shortest line, "and we are in-between." The hyphen joins two words much as the speaker is caught between two states, and the lack of a full stop leaves the line hanging, with no resolution.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it reverses its own opening. It begins by wanting to be the butterfly, and it ends by making the moth, the plainer and more nocturnal creature, the one worth having beside you. Sadness here is not ugly or shameful. It is a kind of membership, and being known by someone who has been there is better than being admired by someone who hasn't. The poem also refuses to put people into two camps, the happy and the sad, and says that most of us shift between them. For a young reader, that may be its most useful idea. A bad night doesn't make you a different kind of creature, and the people who can sit through it with you are often the ones who have had a bad night of their own.