"Hello, I'm back" is how many of us would start a message after a long silence, and the poem opens exactly there: casual, almost breezy, like someone logging back into a chat. The subtitle, «hello again», in its quotation marks, reinforces the sense of a message sent to someone. But the greeting is a trap. Within a few lines we learn that "back" does not mean a happy return. It means a return to a bad place. The speaker is reporting a relapse, in the flat, polite voice of someone who has had to say it before.
The title adds a small scene of its own. Supermarket flowers are the most ordinary gift there is, picked up in a hurry with the weekly shop, and the speaker has thrown them from the windowsill. The flowers never reappear in the poem. We are left to infer what they stood for, and the most natural reading is a gesture of care that the speaker feels unable to accept. The title is in the past tense and the poem in the present, so we arrive after the act, with the mess already made.
The central image is water, and it deepens as the poem goes on. First the speaker mentions "the rabbit hole I came out of", a downward fall. Then the picture changes to "sinking / In this deep, deep ocean", and finally to "I'm drowning". The doubled "deep, deep" works like a voice trailing off, as if the bottom keeps receding. The present participles, "sinking" and "drowning", never complete, so the speaker is stuck in the middle of going under. There is also a bitter irony in "I do not deserve to be clean". The speaker is surrounded by water, which normally washes things, yet cleanliness is denied. The poem doesn't say what "clean" means. It could be being washed, or being free of some harmful habit. Either way the line makes the same point: the speaker has decided to punish themselves.
The form is bare. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, just free verse that moves between short and long lines. Most lines are clipped, but the third is one long, tumbling sentence, as though the speaker's worry briefly overflows. The punctuation is rough too. "Dont" loses its apostrophe twice, while "I'm" keeps its own, and the final "i" is lowercase after capital "I" everywhere else. These look like the marks of a poem written fast and not tidied, and that suits its tone.
The most striking moment is the stretch where the speaker turns on themselves: "I make you miserable / Not happy. / Miserable". The speaker begins to soften the claim with "Not happy", then rejects the softer word and returns to the harsher one, now alone on its line. The unnamed "you" is the only other person in the poem, and the speaker sees themselves only as a source of that person's pain. "I'm horrid" is a surprisingly childish word. It sounds less like a grown-up's reasoned judgement than like a child's blunt verdict on themselves.
The ending is the hardest part. "I was supposed to be dead" uses a passive construction, and we never learn who or what did the supposing. Then comes "But i survived". The "But" treats survival as an interruption of the plan, not a triumph, and the lowercase "i" seems to shrink the speaker as they say it. The poem stops with no full stop and no consolation.
That refusal of comfort is what makes the poem worth reading. We are used to stories where surviving is the happy ending, but here staying alive and feeling alive are separate things, and the poem has the honesty to say so. It uses plain words and an unpolished surface, and it does not decorate pain or hurry to resolve it. The subject is heavy, and if it feels close to home for any reader, telling a trusted adult or friend would be a good next step.