Six lowercase lines, and the speaker has already lost half their fingers. It is a startling place to begin, and the poem never explains it. "king" is about a relationship in which one person holds all the power and the other pays for it, in the body, in self-respect, and in the habit of reassurance. Its central idea is that the speaker has learned to excuse the person who hurts them, and that this has left them without any real standing of their own.
The opening image is oddly tender. "With your fingers, you used to count to ten" sounds like a child's counting game, or someone calming themselves before losing their temper. The next line turns it around: "five of mine are gone." Ten fingers belong to "you", and only five to "me". The poem doesn't say whether this is literal injury or a metaphor for what the speaker has given up, and that ambiguity helps it. Whatever the loss is, it's measured in the same units the "king" once used to count, so the arithmetic itself is lopsided. Then comes the cruelest detail: the one who took is the one who asks, "if you've committed a sin." The king wants absolution, and the person he has wounded is expected to supply it.
The speaker complies: "i bow down, and say 'you can't do harm, when you're the king.'" The line is both flattery and a sharp piece of logic. It echoes the old idea that a monarch stands above the law, and the word "sin" adds a religious note, as if the king answers to nobody but God. The speaker doesn't argue with this, and the bow is physical, matching the damage in the line before. Since the poem never says whether the words are sincere or just a survival tactic, the reader has to decide how much of the submission is fear and how much is habit.
The second stanza turns inward. "i'll never become your queen and i know that for a fact" is blunt, and the speaker states it without self-pity. A queen would at least be a partner, and the speaker has understood they won't be one. What they get instead is a do-it-yourself version of honour: "whenever i get something, it's a crown i have to self-attach." The phrase "self-attach" is wonderfully awkward. It sounds like an instruction leaflet, flat-pack furniture rather than royal ceremony, and that clunkiness suggests how unglamorous it is to give yourself recognition nobody else will give. A crown is supposed to be bestowed, not bolted on alone. The final line, "and the pieces don't even match," suggests the crown is a patchwork. Judging by the earlier "five of mine are gone," it is tempting to read these pieces as fragments of the speaker's own life, salvaged and assembled into something that looks like dignity but doesn't quite fit together.
The form quietly supports this. There is no regular metre. The lines are long and conversational, with the second line stretching well past the first, as if the speaker keeps talking to fill a silence. Each stanza runs on a single end-rhyme. In the first, "ten," "sin" and "king" are only approximate rhymes, which gives a faintly uneasy, off-key chime. In the second, "fact," "self-attach" and "match" rhyme more firmly, and the last of them is the sharpest irony in the poem: the sounds click together neatly at the very moment the sentence says that nothing matches. Even the lowercase "i", repeated throughout, makes the speaker physically smaller on the page than the "you" they serve. The title in guillemets, «king», may also be read as a pair of quotation marks, as though the word is a claim the speaker has been made to repeat rather than a fact.
The poem also covers a lot of time in very few words. "Used to count" is the past, "i bow down" the present, and "i'll never" the future, so a whole relationship is mapped in a handful of verbs. That compression is what makes the poem worth reading. It shows how easily absolution can be demanded from the person who was harmed, and how a person can learn to build their own consolation prizes from mismatched parts. It leaves the reader with an image that stays uncomfortably precise: a self-made crown, and a hand that has fewer fingers to hold it.