Larry's "Achieve" begins with a wish, and almost everything after it is a variation on wanting. The speaker longs to know "the way it feels / To make them all say wow," and the goal is already odd. What is desired is not success itself but the feeling of success, and that feeling depends on an audience. "Them all" are never identified. They are a crowd whose applause the speaker can imagine but not hear. The central idea is that the pressure to achieve can become a private torment, where self-worth hangs on a summit that never comes into view.
The poem's logic is worth watching closely. Three lines open with "If": "If I could feel," "If I could just change," "If the days could only stop." Each promises a result, but the results never quite arrive. "If I could just change, it would change" simply circles back on itself, as if the speaker cannot say what needs to be different, only that difference would help. The one "Then" in the poem, "Then maybe I'm not alone," tries to finish the thought, yet it hedges with "maybe" and does not follow from days stopping at all. The reasoning behaves like the mind it describes: it reaches for a conclusion and slides sideways.
The imagery is sparse but pointed. "The screaming in my head won't stop" is the most violent line, and it sits right beside the offhand "Sometimes I just hit pause," language borrowed from a remote control or a screen. The contrast is telling. The speaker can pause the noise but not end it, and the very next wish repeats the word: "If the days could only stop." Having failed to silence the screaming, the speaker now wants time itself to halt. Later, "My mind is ticking" adds a clock, or perhaps something more threatening, like a countdown. The poem does not say which, and both readings fit the sense of pressure.
A subtle shift happens in "To feel the feel, you must achieve." The pronoun changes from "I" to "you," and the line sounds like a rule picked up from somewhere else, a slogan absorbed rather than chosen. "Feel the feel" is a tautology, a phrase so worn smooth it has stopped meaning anything, which may be the point. Straight after it comes "Somethings are just not real," and the ambiguity is the most interesting moment in the poem. Is the promised feeling unreal? The standards? The "wow" itself? The speaker leaves it open. There is also a quiet sound pattern here. The long "ee" of "feel," "achieve," "real" and finally "reach" ties feeling and achieving together, so that the two seem impossible to separate.
The poem has no stanza breaks and no regular end rhyme. Its first lines move with a fairly steady beat ("If I could feel the way it feels"), which loosens as the lines grow uneven. The closest thing to rhyme is repetition: "stop" returns, "change" doubles, "feel" recurs. Then comes "I lay in my bed thinking about," which breaks off with no object. The reader is left to supply what the speaker cannot finish, and the gap suggests thoughts too many or too heavy to list. What follows is blunt: "It's overwhelming." Judging by the pacing, the speaker has run out of figurative language and simply names the feeling.
The ending sets two directions against each other. The speaker is lying down in bed, yet the final question is about climbing: "Why can't I reach the top?" It is the poem's only direct question, and it gets no answer. The poem just stops, which fits its own wish for things to stop.
The poem is not polished, and that is part of its strength. Its vocabulary is plain, its feelings undecorated, and it never says what the achievement actually is. School, sport, fame and approval all fit, and that blank lets readers fill it with their own version. What it captures well is the trap: the speaker half suspects that the longed-for feeling may be "not real," yet the longing is real enough to keep them awake.