Some relationships don't end so much as flicker, and this poem lives inside that flicker. Its speaker describes a bond that cannot hold a steady temperature: one day "WE MAKE THE MOST OF EVERY SECOND TOGETHER," the next "WE DON'T EVEN LOOK AT EACHOTHER." The poem never says whether this is friendship or love, and it doesn't need to. "Hang out" and "keep in touch" are everyday phrases, and that ordinariness is the point. The pain comes from small, repeated lurches, not one dramatic break. The central idea sits in a neat pair of rhymed lines: "IT'S INCONSISTENT / I WANT IT PERSISTENT." The speaker doesn't ask for perfection, only for something that stays.
The structure copies the problem it describes. Almost every stanza leans on the pattern "ONE DAY... THE NEXT," so the poem swings back and forth like the relationship. Even the rhymes seem to wobble. "TOGETHER" and "ANOTHER" almost match but not quite, and "DAY" and "SAY" chime neatly, only to land on "NOTHING TO SAY," a rhyme that celebrates silence. "HEAL" and "DEAL" are one consonant apart, which makes recovery and mere coping sound like near neighbours. The short, clipped lines and frequent rhymes give the poem a quick, almost sing-song pulse, and that bounce sits uneasily against how bleak the content becomes.
The imagery turns violent in the middle. "BULLETS ARE SHOT THROUGH US" is blunt, but the next stanza is stranger and more interesting: "WE UNINTENTIONALLY GROW ARMS OUT / AND SHOOT EACH OTHER IN BROAD LIGHT." The word "unintentionally" matters. Nobody here is a villain. The wounds happen almost as a bodily reflex, as if the two people sprout weapons without choosing to. "Broad light" echoes the idiom "broad daylight," which suggests the hurt is open and visible, with nothing hidden. Then comes the flat, tidy "THEN MAKE IT RIGHT," as though the repair were as automatic as the damage. The cycle explains why nothing ever settles.
The most telling moment is the four-line confession: "I'M FINE / I DON'T MIND / I LIE / I'M LOSING ALL THAT'S MINE." Each line is only a few syllables long, and the long "i" sound runs through all four, which makes the stanza feel like a repeated, self-soothing phrase that finally cracks. The first two lines are what the speaker tells the other person. The third, "I LIE," is three words of honesty. The last line shifts from "us" to "mine," so the speaker's loss becomes personal and not just shared.
The closing image is the poem's best. "LIKE A COOKIE DIPPED IN TEA" is domestic and comforting, and it pairs with "SIMPLE AND SWEET" to describe how things used to be. But dipping a biscuit is also a risky act: leave it a second too long and it collapses into the cup. Whether or not the speaker intends it, the comparison carries its own warning. The very thing that makes the moment sweet can soften and break it. The final words are spread across short lines, "NOT WHAT WE / HAVE NOW, / CRUMBING DOWN," so that "WE" hangs alone at a line's end for a beat before the sentence moves on. "Crumbing" is not the standard word (we would expect "crumbling"), but the clipped form feels fitting, since the word seems to lose a piece of itself as it falls. The poem also ends without a full stop, leaving the decline unfinished.
The all-capital lettering shapes how we hear all this. Nothing is whispered. Everything arrives at the same volume, which can read as shouting or as the flattening effect of being overwhelmed, when every feeling feels equally urgent. The joined-up "EACHOTHER" reinforces the sense of closeness, since the two words are pushed together on the page, even as the line describes people who won't look at one another. The title, "strand of hair no.3," is something we can only guess at. Judging by the number, it seems to belong to a sequence, and a single strand of hair is thin, easily shed, and easily tangled, which would suit a bond this fragile.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a very common experience. It doesn't resolve the situation or assign blame. It simply stays in the confusion of caring about someone who keeps coming and going, and it finds fresh, slightly odd images for it. A reader who has ever waited for a message, or pretended to be fine, will recognise the speaker at once.