Jimmy Dean Inman starts like a man giving a lecture and ends like one overruled by his own feelings. The subtitle, «The mentality of a man», promises a general study, and the opening stanzas deliver one: "We are all made equal. / Yet molded by experence." The pronoun is "we", the sentences are short and sure, and love is treated almost as a biological program. We want a mate, we want to pass on our name, we are "egotistical." The speaker sounds as if he is stating laws.
Then comes the hinge: "But To me it's different." From there the confident "we" keeps getting punctured by "I" and "her." The central idea is that general theories about men and jealousy fall apart when the loss is personal. The speaker seems half aware of this. He keeps reaching for the group as cover ("Its a instinct. / One by nature") while the pain leaks through the gaps.
The construction is bare. There is no rhyme, and the lines are mostly two to five words, each ending in a full stop. The rhythm is clipped and stop-start, like speech through clenched teeth, or like someone counting to stay calm. Most stanzas are tercets, which makes the exceptions stand out. "But she was taken." sits alone as a single line, isolated as she has been. The pairs "Keep. / Lose." and "Have. / Have taken." show the same pressure. The speaker offers life's two choices, then breaks the pattern with a third, and "Have taken" is a verb left without its object, as if the sentence can't finish. Likewise, "Not by life. / Not by death. / But him." clears away the ordinary, forgivable explanations until only a pronoun is left. Neither man nor woman gets a name, which keeps the poem pointed at a type of situation rather than a case.
One line is worth slowing down for: "I had her taken." Read literally, it sounds as if he arranged it. Read charitably, it means he had her and then lost her. Whether or not this was intended, the phrasing shows a mind that thinks of a person as something to be had, kept, or taken. The poem partly notices this itself: "We take theft as a sign of war."
The imagery is quietly mechanical, and it centres on driving. "Kicks in" repeats four times, and ego, jealousy, pain and anger engage like gears. Then "we speed home." The closing list picks up the metaphor: "turns. / Curves. / And stop signs." The mind is a road, and stop signs are where a driver ought to halt and think. The poem never says whether this man did.
The most painful stretch is a sequence of tellings: "We tell ourselves what we must. / We tell others it doesn't matter. / She tells me we never mattered." The lines move from self-deception to public pose to her verdict. The answer comes in three blunt lines, "He matters. / She matters. / I matter." These recall the opening claim that we are "all made equal", but equality now works as a consolation rather than a theory. Notably, the speaker puts himself last.
The ending turns on its own title. "Simple. / Yet complex." echoes the early "Yet molded", and then the last line revises the subtitle: "The mentality of a man. / Or maybe a Boy." The capital B is a small, deflating gesture. After many lines excusing jealousy as instinct, the speaker suspects it may be immaturity.
The surface is unpolished. Spellings like "experence" and "jealously" (where "jealousy" is meant), and oddities like "hims" and "Our egos kicks in", give the text a draft-like feel. Judging by the tone, this roughness suits a speaker too hurt to revise, though a reader might equally see it as a limit. The poem's significance lies in its candor. Many poems about heartbreak cast the speaker as wronged and the rival as villain. This one begins by defending a male instinct and ends by doubting it, and the doubt is what makes it worth reading.