Violence is rarely greeted with affection, which is exactly why the opening of Koru's poem lands so hard. The word sits alone in guillemets under the title, as though it were an addressee or a name on an envelope, and then the first line speaks to it warmly: "My old friend." The rest of the poem lives inside that clash. The speaker is saying goodbye to something harmful, but without pretending it was ever simply repellent.
The poem is about leaving a violent self behind and about how incomplete that leaving feels. The speaker admits to missing it ("I sometimes miss you"), recalls "all the fun we had," and explains that the friendship ended because violence "was taking control of me." Its central idea is that change is not a clean break. The old self survives as a temptation, a memory, and a face in the mirror. What the speaker offers in its place is a hard-won, modest claim: "I'm far better than I was."
The poem is built from very short, plain statements, most of them a single sentence to a line, and there is no rhyme or regular metre. That bareness suits the subject. There is no decoration here, only a speaker stating things as flatly as possible, and the flatness reads as honesty. The repeated phrasing works almost like a mantra. "Had to come to a stop" is followed a couple of lines later by "It had to come to an end." The insistence on "had to" sounds like someone persuading himself as much as informing us.
Two small words carry much of the emotional weight. "Sometimes" appears three times: the speaker sometimes misses violence, it sometimes comes back, and he sometimes sees the old person in the mirror. "Always" appears twice, once for the taste of blood and once for the guilt. Set side by side, the words suggest that the pull of violence is occasional while the guilt is constant. The speaker's conscience is more reliable than his temptation, which is a quietly hopeful detail.
The imagery is brief but physical. "The blood running down my face" is the only real picture in the poem, and it is the speaker's own blood. Judging by the image, violence cost him as well as others. The follow-up, "Always left a salty taste," is oddly intimate, since taste is the sense we use for things we have taken inside ourselves. It also complicates the "fun." The pleasure and the pain arrive in the same mouthful, and the poem never separates them.
The mirror in the second half works as a quiet turning point. "I remember who you made me" hands some responsibility to violence, as if it had authored the speaker, but the guilt in the line before shows he does not use that as an excuse. Then comes the neat pivot: "I sometimes look in the mirror and see that person. / But I am no longer that person." The "But" is the poem's one moment of firm resistance.
Pronouns tell their own story. In the first two-thirds of the poem, "you" is everywhere: you took control, you come back, you made me. In the last two lines, "you" disappears and only "I" remains. Violence is dropped from the grammar just as the speaker claims to have dropped it from his life. The final line is also careful. He does not say he is good, only "far better," a comparison with his own past rather than a claim of perfection. The "far" might be confidence, or it might be the emphasis of someone still convincing himself. The poem leaves that open.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of the tidy redemption story. It lets the speaker enjoy remembering, feel guilty about it, and still choose differently. In fourteen lines, it suggests that recovering from something destructive means living honestly with the part of you that still hears it knock.