Seven short lines are enough for Lance Harbison's "Its clear" to travel from frustration to something much darker. The speaker begins with a familiar complaint, being ignored, and ends with a conclusion that is quietly alarming. What gives the poem its force is how calmly it gets there. Nobody shouts the final line. It arrives like the answer to a sum.
The opening couplet is built on repetition: "Talking but no one listens / Screaming but no one hears." The grammar is identical in both lines, but the verbs escalate. Talking becomes screaming, listening becomes mere hearing, and the speaker's effort grows while the response stays at zero. The lines are in the present tense and use "-ing" forms throughout (talking, screaming, sitting, taking), which makes the situation feel ongoing, with no sign of an end. Then comes "Enveloped in all of my fears," where the active verbs give way to a passive one. After two lines of straining to be heard, the speaker is simply wrapped up and contained. An envelope is also something sealed and sent, and a message with no one to receive it fits the poem's mood well.
The fourth line, "Im sitting here taking all of it in," is the flattest and most prose-like in the poem, and that flatness works. The speaker has stopped performing and is only observing. There is a quiet irony in "taking all of it in": this person absorbs everything around them, while nobody takes them in. The missing apostrophes in "Im" and "its" (and in the title itself) make the text look unpolished, like something typed fast and left unedited. Whether or not that was deliberate, it suits a voice that sounds raw rather than crafted.
The sound of the poem is worth listening to, since sound is its central subject. The rhymes fall on "hears," "fears," "clear" and "disappear." Each of these contains the sound "ear," and "hears" contains the actual word. In a poem about not being heard, the ear is buried in the rhyme scheme. The first pair, "hears" and "fears," sit side by side and link the lack of an audience to the speaker's anxiety. The second pair is held back until the last line, so "clear" and "disappear" are separated by a line that doesn't rhyme at all. When the final rhyme lands, it clicks shut like the end of a proof. The lines are loose, with roughly three or four beats each and no strict meter, but that last rhyme gives the ending a feeling of inevitability.
The key phrase is "crystal clear." Clarity is normally good news, yet here it is the moment things go wrong. Crystal is also transparent, and the poem seems to play on this. The speaker has been unheard and, by implication, unseen, so the clearest thing in the room is a person nobody looks at. Judging by the wording, the speaker feels already half invisible, which makes "disappear" sound like the next step in a process rather than a sudden leap.
The final two lines turn on two absolute words. Earlier, "no one" listens. Now the speaker wants to "make everyone happy." Both words are total, and the poem never considers anything in between, such as one person who might listen or a few people whose happiness doesn't depend on the speaker. The word "first" matters too. It treats disappearance as step one of a plan, with happiness following as a reward the speaker will never see. That reasoning is where the poem is most unsettling, and also where a reader can push back. The speaker believes their presence is the obstacle to everyone else's happiness, but nothing in the poem supports that. It is a conclusion reached in isolation, and the poem shows how isolation can make a bleak idea feel like logic.
That is why the poem is worth reading closely despite its brevity. It names a common feeling, speaking and not being heard, and shows how it can harden into a belief that one's absence would help. The poem does not argue with that belief, and we are left to do so ourselves. If words like these ever describe how you feel, rather than how a speaker feels, the answer is the opposite of the poem's: tell someone, and keep telling them until someone listens.