Fifteen words, no capital letters, one question mark. The poem signed by kin has no title beyond the three asterisks that stand in for one, and it gives a reader very little to hold. Nothing reliable is known to me about who kin is, so everything here rests on the words on the page. A speaker has let someone go, and in the very next breath asks whether sadness is now required.
The central idea is the gap between an event and the feeling that is supposed to follow it. Departures, whether between friends, lovers or family, come with a script, and the script says the one left behind should grieve. This speaker checks that script against their own heart and isn't sure it fits. The poem never says whether the answer is no, or yes but I shouldn't say so, or I can't tell. That refusal to settle is what makes it more than a shrug.
Start with the verb "let." To "let" someone go presents the departure as a gift, something the speaker allowed rather than suffered. It could be pride, or a way of protecting oneself, or simply the truth. It also sounds like what people say when they could not have stopped it anyway. The "him" is never identified. He might be a partner, a friend, a relative, even someone who has died, because "go" is wide enough to hold all of these. Since the word kin means family in ordinary English, it is tempting to hear that underneath "him," though that is a reading and not evidence.
The grammar of "the way he want" gives the line its voice. A polished version would be "his own way" or "the way he wants." What we get sounds spoken, a little off-balance, with no tidy "-s" on the verb. I can't tell whether this comes from dialect, from English as a second language, or from a deliberate choice, but the effect is directness. The stray "to" makes "go" point toward a destination, and "the way he want" almost becomes a place the man is heading for. His desire is left unpolished and unqualified, and the speaker doesn't argue with it.
The sound is nearly bare. Every word in the first line is a single syllable, and in the second line only "supposed" has two. It is the one word that stretches, and it is the word about outside pressure, the voice of other people's expectations. The rhythm is quietly telling. The first line walks forward on a steady beat (LET, GO, WAY, WANT), like someone calmly watching a person leave. The second drops to two heavy beats, "posed" and "sad," with a limp "to be" between them. There is no rhyme, and "want" and "sad" end their lines without chiming. A rhyme would have closed the thought neatly, and the poem is deliberately not closed.
There is a small structural drama too. The "i" appears in both lines, but its position changes. In the first it is the subject, the one acting: "i let him go." In the second, "am i supposed," it has become the person acted upon by an obligation. The word "to" echoes across the lines in the same way, first as direction ("go to") and then as duty ("supposed to"). Between the two lines is a blank space, and the feeling the speaker is probing seems to sit there, unspoken. Even the odd gap before the question mark, "sad ?", works as a hesitation, a breath before the question is allowed to hang in the air.
The question can be read in at least two ways. Spoken defiantly, it means "why on earth should I be?" Spoken quietly, it means "I thought I would be, so what is wrong with me?" A third reading is the saddest: the speaker is sad, and is asking permission, or pretending otherwise. The poem gives no tone of voice, so the reader has to supply one, and what they supply may say something about themselves.
That is where the poem's significance lies. In so few words, it catches a feeling many people know but rarely say: numbness, restraint, or concealed hurt in the face of loss, and the awkward sense of being watched by what you are "supposed" to feel. It does this without a single image of tears, empty rooms or closed doors. It leaves only an act of letting go and a question, and the question is the real subject of the poem.