Supermarket flowers are the kind you pick up in passing: cheap, quick to wilt, a small tenderness squeezed in between the milk and the bread. The title of this piece tells us that someone threw them from a windowsill, and then the poem never mentions them again. What follows is a run of questions and half-answers, as though the title is the action and the body is the thought that goes with it. We can only infer what the flowers meant. Perhaps they were bought in hope of a meeting that never came, or left to die on the sill while the speaker waited. Throwing them out of the window, rather than into a bin, feels like a gesture of anger or release, and a messier one than tidy disposal.
The central idea is the gap between a reason and an explanation. The speaker has a reason ready: "Distance is keeping us apart." But the poem's own logic undercuts it. "I want to see you / You want to see me" is set out as a neat symmetry, two equal wishes facing each other. If both are true, then "Whats stopping us" should be easy to answer, yet six years have passed. The speaker supplies the answer almost grudgingly. "I know" comes as a short, flat line, and then the word "Distance" gets a line to itself and is immediately repeated, as if saying it twice might make it more convincing. It doesn't. The repetition sounds like someone testing a word to see whether it can bear the weight placed on it.
The poem's form leaves the speaker exposed. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short and made of plain, mostly one-syllable words, and they sound like speech or a typed message more than composed verse. Apostrophes are missing throughout ("Its", "cant", "Whats", "Im"), and so is all end punctuation. Even the questions have no question marks, which gives them a strange flatness, as if the speaker has asked them so many times that the rising tone has worn away. Writing "6 years" with a numeral instead of a word adds to this. It reads like a tally, something counted rather than described.
Pronouns do quiet work here. The poem opens with the impersonal "it" ("Why does it have to be like this"), then moves to "we", then to "I" facing "you", then to "us" twice. The speaker is building a shared position, a "we" against the obstacle. But the last line, "I just dont understand anymore", leaves only "I". The togetherness the poem has been reaching for dissolves at the moment of admission. The word "anymore" matters too. It suggests there was a time when the explanation did satisfy, and that this patience has run out.
Then there is "Im sorry", which sits oddly in the middle of the poem. We aren't told what for. It could be an apology for pressing the question, for giving up, or for sounding angry. The poem keeps it unexplained, and that makes the speaker's position more uncertain: someone who feels wronged but still apologises.
The italicised-looking line in guillemets, «i dont understand», sits under the title like a caption or a quoted message, in lowercase and without ceremony. It states the whole poem in four words, and the last line returns to it with a capital letter and a little more weight. The poem moves from a bare statement to the same statement with a long, tired history behind it.
What makes the poem significant is how much it gets from so little. It trusts ordinary language, the kind people actually use when they are hurt and trying not to say too much. And it leaves the relationship unnamed. Nothing says whether the other person is a partner, a friend or a family member, so any reader who has waited for someone can step into the gap. The cheap flowers in the title do the rest, giving us a small, concrete object to hold while the speaker's feelings stay hard to put into words.