Almost forty lines of single words, and then one sentence that turns the whole list into evidence. Krystal's «00.17» begins as a playful inventory under the heading "Words I like saying," and ends as a complaint. The speaker has a huge range of words to love, so why does someone keep choosing the one that gets her wrong?
The title looks like a timestamp, a few minutes past midnight. That is an inference from its form, but the poem's content fits it. Bed, pillows, stars, emptiness: these are the words of someone awake while the world is quiet and has time to turn her own vocabulary over in her mouth.
The list is carefully ordered, even if it looks random. It opens with politeness: "Thank you," "You're welcom," "fine." These are the words we say on autopilot, and "fine" in particular is the word people use to close a conversation rather than answer it. Then the poem drifts into the physical and the sensory: water, ocean, flowers, bed, pillows, hands, kiwis. Next come grander things (art, love, hate) and a string of places: Spain, Greece, "Lala land," Paris. The comic "Lala land" sits between real countries and a real city and reminds us that these words are loved for their sound and for the daydreams they open. Then the mood darkens. "Emptyness" and "Faces" appear, and the list closes on "Clouds / Rain / Colours / Pain." The poem has moved from small talk to feeling, and its last listed word is the heaviest.
There is no planned rhyme scheme, yet the sound-play is strong, and it supports the idea that these are words chosen for how they feel to say. "Spain," "Rain" and "Pain" share a sound and are scattered across the poem, so that the holiday destination and the weather and the hurt seem quietly related. "Places" and "Faces" chime. "True," "Who," "Blue" and "Do" all share one long vowel, and "Floor" and "More" echo each other. Mid-list, the run "True / Not / Who / Thought" almost reads like a half-sentence, a flicker of thinking caught in the middle of a catalogue. The "Try / Do / Some / More" sequence works like a small pep talk delivered in the speaker's own voice.
The spelling matters too. "Welcom," "Pation," "Emptyness," and the cryptic "Iso" give the list an unpolished, typed-in-the-moment feel. Whether or not that was intended, it makes the poem sound like a real voice rather than a finished performance. It also adds an irony to the last line, where the word "unpronunced" is itself slightly off. A poem about a name being mishandled contains words that are slightly mishandled on the page.
That last line is the poem's hinge. Until now, every line has been a fragment with no punctuation, one word at a time. Now we get a full sentence addressed to a "you," with a comma that runs on breathlessly: "You can say whatever you want, why would you choose to always say my unpronunced name?" The word "always" suggests a habit, and "choose" makes it an accusation. The speaker has just shown how many words exist, so the repetition of one can't be an accident. "My" claims the name as hers, even as the adjective admits that it is rarely said properly, or said at all. The poem is signed Krystal, but the text never says the name in question is that one, so it is safer to leave it open.
The poem's central idea is a contrast between chosen words and imposed ones. The list shows a person as she hears herself, made of oceans, books, blue and rain. The last line shows how she is reduced when someone else speaks to her, to a single, mispronounced label. The pleasure of speaking freely, which fills the first thirty-eight lines, is set against the discomfort of being spoken to.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it needs. It has no elaborate metaphor, just a list and a turn, and the turn works because the list has built up so much variety first. Anyone who has had a name mangled, or shortened, or repeated at them, will feel the sting in that last question.