The most important word in "its shitty how this goes" is also its least poetic. "Shitty" comes back again and again, and each time it works like a shrug, a way of saying something enormous in a voice that refuses to sound dramatic. The credit line gives only a username and no date, so the text has to do all the talking. What it says is fairly clear. The speaker dreams of happiness, wakes to find the person gone, and spends the rest of the poem circling the real person behind the dream, someone who once said "i love you" and now leaves the speaker unable to tell lust from a lifetime's devotion.
The refrain holds the poem together, and its small changes matter. The opening is hedged: "kind of shitty how this goes, / isn't it?" By the end the "kind of" has gone, and the closing line is flat and certain. In between, the phrase attaches itself to different things: a memory ("how i remember that night"), a kiss ("how perfectly your lips locked with me"), then a whole emotional state ("how i feel"). The word that starts as a mild complaint ends up covering both the best and the worst of what the speaker feels. The tag question "isn't it?" also pulls the beloved into the conversation, as if the speaker were half-hoping for agreement and half-hoping to be contradicted.
The imagery tends to be about things that vanish. The person disappears "like the smoke from a cigarette," then the comparison turns inward: "escaped me like the air from my lungs when you look at me." That second simile sits in the poem's longest, most breathless line, which runs on until it feels as if the reader is out of air too. Next to this sit the memories that feel truly intimate, and none of them are glamorous. The speaker recalls being sick in a bathroom while the other person held back their hair and "got up every hour to check up on me." That sentence loses its subject halfway through, and the grammar slackens as the memory takes over. The poem suggests that love is proven more by this plain, unglamorous care than by any declaration.
A quieter pattern runs through the verbs of holding. The beloved "held my hand in a soft gentle loving way" and "held my hair back," but by the end the same gesture has turned into something closer to capture: "you have such a hold on me," "you hold my heart in your hands." The tenderness that made the speaker fall in love is exactly what now feels like a trap. The poem's one grand image, "a match made in heaven," is a stock phrase, but it is quickly paired with "i'd walk through hell," and the speaker's emotions swing between those two poles. It may be a coincidence, but a match also sits close to the cigarette smoke earlier in the poem, so the ideal of love and the image of something burning away are only a few lines apart.
Against all this sits the speaker's stated position: "i say no strings attached." The word "say" matters. It admits that this is a line the speaker delivers rather than a feeling they have. The crude phrase about wanting to "fuck your brains out" is set right beside "live the rest of my life with you," and the speaker admits they cannot tell the two apart. The decision to "close my eyes and act like you don't have such a hold on me" is openly a performance, and "act like" is repeated within two lines.
The ending adds one more twist. "You know you're the one i want / but don't want to be the one for me" most naturally reads as an accusation: the other person knows they are wanted but will not take on the role. Because the line has no punctuation to settle it, it can also be heard as the speaker's own contradiction. Both readings leave the same bind, which is wanting someone who either will not or cannot be the one.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no regular meter or rhyme. The lowercase letters and loose punctuation make it read like speech or a message typed in a hurry. The only echoes are accidental-sounding ones, like the repeated "me" at the ends of lines. The poem's significance is in that unpolished honesty. It does not dress a very ordinary kind of heartbreak in elaborate metaphors. It uses everyday language, a blunt swear word and a looping refrain to show a feeling many readers will recognise: pretending not to care while caring completely.