"Funny" is the most deceptive word in Jimmy Dean Inman's poem. It appears eight times, always followed by "how," and each time it means the opposite of amusing. The speaker is talking about a relationship that has ended, or gone sour, and the joke is a bitter one. The central idea is that the speaker has chosen restraint over revenge and is trying to pass this off as indifference. The final stanza suggests the hurt is still there.
The opening stanza works like a list of shrugs. "Things change" and "things happen" are the kind of phrases people use when they don't want to say more. Then the pattern shifts: "people change," and then "people happen." The last phrase is odd and a little ungrammatical, and that is what makes it work. People don't normally "happen," but things like accidents and weather do. By putting people in that verb, the speaker suggests that someone has arrived in their life like an event, something to be endured rather than chosen.
The next two stanzas turn this vague wisdom into accusation. The speaker "wanted an ex / Yet go back to different one," and the lines are clumsy in a way that sounds like real speech. "You loved me / Yet you kiss another one" is the sharpest moment. "One" ends two lines in a row, so the new lover is reduced to a countable object, interchangeable and unnamed. The third stanza is built on a single word. "I'm not rude / Yet you are the opposite" and "I let it go / Yet you did the opposite" use "opposite" twice, and the repetition is the speaker's way of keeping score. Each "Yet" is a small act of self-defence, setting the speaker's good behaviour against the other person's bad. The second "opposite" is ambiguous. It could mean "you refused to let go," or it could mean "you did something worse." The poem doesn't settle it.
The fourth stanza breaks the pattern, and "Funny how" disappears. The sentences are short and stop-start: "What was once. / Is no longer." Splitting a single thought across two full stops makes it sound as though the speaker can't get the sentence out in one breath. The appetite image, "I lost my hunger," treats love as something physical that has faded, though the next line, "But tell me I wasn't in love," sounds less like a question than a dare. Here the poem also starts to rhyme properly, with "love" and "above," then "ways" and "day." Rhyme is mostly absent from the first stanzas, so its arrival makes the ending feel like a door being closed. The pairing of "love" and "above" is a very familiar one, and the speaker uses it flatly, without decoration. "I just don't look above" is a good image of refusing to look up, and judging by the context, refusing to look at the other person or at the situation.
The ending is where the poem's real tension sits. "So no. / I won't call you names" is a promise of restraint. But the last lines undercut it: "But get someone to say something. / I'll leave that for another day." Read one way, the speaker is only saying they will let the matter rest. Read another, they are holding a threat in reserve. The poem never says which, and that uncertainty keeps the calm from being fully believable. Someone who truly felt nothing would not need to list what they refuse to do.
What makes the poem worth reading is this gap between tone and feeling. Its language is plain, its lines are short, and it avoids elaborate metaphor, so it sounds like someone talking themselves down in real time. The repeated "Funny how" starts as a way of sounding casual and ends as a way of keeping hold of anger. The poem is about the effort of not saying everything, and the pressure of what is held back is what the reader hears.