Someone has asked the speaker to go over it all again, and the speaker is worn out by the asking. The poem opens in that moment: "must I repeat," "must I explain." These are not real questions but weary protests, and what they defend is one stubborn image, "purple bruises and broken teeth." Over the poem's two halves, the demand to explain hardens first into refusal and then into something sadder: inability.
Start with the colour. "Not blue nor green but purple indeed" is a strange thing to insist on, until you remember that bruises change colour as they heal. Judging by the imagery, the speaker will not let the wound move on to its gentler shades. It stays at its rawest stage. The teeth work the same way in a different register, since bruises fade but a broken tooth does not mend itself. By pairing a temporary injury with a lasting one, the poem lets the lasting one set the tone. The pairing "healed nor fixed" does similar work: we heal bodies and fix objects, and the speaker seems to feel like both, hurt and damaged beyond repair.
The middle section turns on a phrase from school. "Show and tell" is the classroom ritual of presenting something to others, and the speaker swaps it for "feel and to scream," language that comes from the body, not from a lesson. Then comes "to see but not to touch," which sounds like a rule in a museum, as if the wound were an exhibit. The sharpest moment is the pair "touch is what brought them / sight is what lost them." The "them" has no clear antecedent, though the bruises and teeth are the likeliest candidates. Touch bringing bruises is easy to follow. Sight *losing* something is stranger, and the strangeness seems to be the point: being looked at, being made a spectacle, costs the speaker something too. The little aside "you see" quietly turns that accusation on the reader.
There is no regular rhyme scheme, and the lines are short and uneven, but the sound is carefully threaded. A long *ee* runs through "teeth," "repeat," "indeed," "feel," "scream" and "see," so the vowel that opens the poem comes back at its most intense moment. The repeated "not… nor…" pattern gives the first stanza a rhythm of correction, like someone fixing a careless record of what happened.
The second stanza repeats the first, with small changes, and the changes are the poem. "Must I repeat" becomes "I will not repeat." "Must I explain" becomes "I can not explain." The first is a refusal, the second an admission that explanation is out of reach, and the difference between *will not* and *can not* is the emotional centre of the poem. "Broken for sure" becomes "never be healed nor fixed that's for certain," so the verdict has moved from a present fact to a permanent one. "Not to show and to tell" returns as "I cannot show / And i cannot tell," which turns a preference into a limit.
The ending is the most carefully built part. "I have felt and I have fought" uses the present perfect, a past that has not finished. "Fought" is the only word of agency in the poem, and the speaker does not say what was fought, or against whom. The last line, "the touch will never leave and sights will forever stay," shifts from the singular to the plural. Earlier, "sight" was an abstraction. Now "sights" are plural, like flashes of memory that return on their own. And there is a quiet irony in the structure: a stanza that announces "I will not repeat" is itself a repetition of the first. The poem cannot stop circling back, which is exactly what it says about the pain.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about the limits of telling. It never says who caused the harm, when, or why, and it gives the reader no story to hold. We are cast as the person who keeps asking "what happened?", and we are refused. The poem is consistent with physical violence, but its refusal to name anything leaves it open to other kinds of hurt as well. In under a hundred words, it argues that some experiences cannot be shown or explained, only felt, and that the people who carry them should not owe anyone a performance.