The first thing the speaker does in this poem is smile, and she admits it is a disguise. She is "trying to hide / With my smile" while "my skin is crawling" and "the blood is in my fingernails." The gap between what she shows and what she feels drives everything that follows. She "pretend[s] to laugh at what you say," and the verb gives the performance away. The one thing she cannot fake is touch: "I recognise your face / But your hands don't feel safe." The line is precise and unsettling. A face is what we see and trust, while hands are what actually reach us. The poem never says whose hands these are, or what the "fight" was, even though she says she told "you about that fight." We get the fact of the telling but not its content. The crawling skin, the blood and the unsafe hands suggest violence or violation, but that is an inference, and the poem's refusal to spell it out feels deliberate. Some experiences are felt in the body long before they can be told as a story.
The first stanza also loops back on itself. "Fight" closes the opening line and the final line, as if she cannot get out of it. The spelling "loosing" is probably a slip for "losing," but it accidentally suggests something loosed or set free, a fight that has got out of control.
In the second stanza the violence turns inward. She cuts her hair "with a blade / To erase all the traces of that girl." Her earlier self is "that girl," a stranger in the third person, which shows how far she has pulled away from who she was. Then "I couldn't feel clean in my own skin / So i burnt it off." The "it" slides from hair to skin, and whether this is literal or figurative the poem leaves open. The word "clean" implies shame, and the bracketed "(Just to torture myself)" admits that this is punishment. The stanza before suggests she is the one who was hurt, yet here she treats herself as the guilty party.
The most striking choice is the brackets. Read without them, the stanza tells a small myth: "An angel that cut through the sky / With her wings alight / And sunk right through the ground / When I fell from those colossal heights." Read the bracketed lines alone and you get a flat confession: "I am in hell," "nothing remained." The two voices interrupt each other, one grand and mythic, the other plain and numb. The pronouns give the game away. The angel has "her wings," but the last line says "I fell," so the angel was the speaker all along. Telling it as someone else's story is another way of standing outside herself. Her verb "cut" also links the angel to the girl with the blade, and the fire of "burnt," "alight" and "hell" links the body to the sky. This is a fallen angel, and she does not stop at the ground but sinks through it.
The title adds a final twist. "When the Skies Fell" describes a disaster that comes down on you from outside. In the poem, though, she is the one who falls, from "colossal heights." The sky here seems to stand for whatever once felt safe or high, and the poem cannot decide whether it collapsed on her or she dropped out of it.
There is no regular rhyme or metre. The lines are short and plain, with almost no punctuation apart from the brackets, so the extreme images arrive in an everyday voice. Sound still binds the poem together. A long "i" runs through it, in "I," "hide," "smile," "fight," "night," "sky," "alight" and "heights," and "alight" quietly answers "fight" across the stanza break, linking the fight to the fire. The last line is the longest, and "colossal" is a grand, heavy word among small ones. It stretches the fall out for as long as it can.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it shows a self splitting into the smiling self, the self at war with its own body, and the mythic self that watches it all burn. It offers no comfort, ending on "nothing remained." But she did tell "you" what happened, and the poem is another act of telling.