A band-aid is supposed to stay put, so it matters that the first comparison in "Phrases" is to one that doesn't. The opening line makes the phrases themselves the actors, not the speaker. They "keep sticking and falling / To my brain," as though language were something that happens to the mind rather than something the mind controls. The word "to" is telling. The phrases cling to the surface of the brain the way adhesive clings to skin, and like a cheap bandage they never stay on for long. The central idea is already in place. The speaker is reaching for words to explain an inner state, and the words will not hold.
The single word "Metaphors" gets a line to itself, like a pause in which the speaker catches themselves in the act. Strictly speaking, what follows are similes, since each is introduced by "like." But the loose labelling suits a poem about phrases that won't stay fixed. The poem then offers three attempts, and each is a small picture of failure. A band-aid fails to hold, a graph fails to give an answer, and an Oreo fails to stay in one piece. Sticking, solving and holding together are three ordinary ways of being in order, and the speaker finds all of them already broken.
The math image is the most puzzling and rewards slow reading. "If I were put on a graph / There would be no solution." In algebra, the classic picture of "no solution" is two parallel lines that run side by side and never meet. So when the speaker adds "But I could not be two parallel lines," the sentence seems to argue with itself. One reading is that even the tidy, textbook version of "no answer" is too neat. Parallel lines are at least orderly and predictable, and the speaker feels messier than that. Another is that parallel lines never touch, whereas the speaker's divided parts do collide. The poem doesn't settle the question, and that is part of its effect. The speaker borrows the language of a subject with right answers to describe a situation that has none. The word "solution" also hints at a problem, and at a person who feels like one that can't be solved.
The Oreo is the homeliest image and the cruelest. A cookie twisted apart, with the cream clinging to one side, is a small domestic joke, and the humour makes what follows land harder. The last three lines are built like a staircase: Oreos "can split apart in any way," "I can split apart in any way," "I am splitting apart in every way." Almost every word that changes matters. The cookie becomes the speaker. "Can," which means possibility, becomes "am," which means now. "Split" becomes the continuous "splitting," which has no finish line. "Any" hardens into "every." The comparison also disappears. Where the earlier lines hold the image at arm's length with "like how," the final line drops the simile and states the situation outright.
The sound of the poem follows the same path. It is free verse with no regular rhyme, and the early lines are short and ragged, as if thoughts were arriving in scraps: "Like band aids," "Metaphors." Only at the end do the lines lengthen and settle into near-matching rhythm, with three lines of almost equal weight all ending on "way." That repeated word is the closest the poem comes to rhyme, and it arrives exactly when the meaning is falling apart. The form becomes most orderly as the self becomes least orderly. The insistent repetition feels less like control than like a thought on a loop, an echo of the phrases that "keep" sticking and falling in the first line.
The speaker's grammar shifts too. The word "I" does not appear until the sixth line, and even there the speaker is passive, something "put on a graph." By the end "I" is the subject of every clause. The speaker has moved from being acted on by stray phrases to naming what is happening to them.
The poem never says what the feeling is, and it never uses a word like "sad" or "anxious." That restraint is its strength. The reader has to infer the feeling from the failed comparisons, which makes the poem's point felt rather than explained. Its significance lies in this honesty about the limits of figurative language. It uses metaphors to say that metaphors fall short, and the shortfall becomes the meaning. It also makes the vocabulary of the math classroom and the snack cupboard carry real weight, without ever raising its voice.