Hardly any poems about love begin with "I'm scared," and that blunt opening is the key to this one. Headed with the spaced-out letters M A D I and the single word «Lightning.» in guillemets, the poem is a confession of fear. The speaker is not worried that someone else will steal their partner, or that the partner will leave. The worry is about the speaker's own heart: "What if I look at you and / decide that / I don't love you anymore."
The word "Lightning" sets up the central image, and it is a double-edged one. Lightning is dazzling, sudden and impossible to plan, which is how falling in love often feels. But lightning is also over in an instant. The poem's second half picks up the idea through the word "spark," a small cousin of lightning, and asks what happens "if that spark goes away." If love arrived like a flash of electricity, nothing guarantees it will stay lit. Because the title sits in guillemets, it reads like a quoted word, perhaps a name the speaker gives to what they feel. That is an inference, but it fits the way the poem treats the feeling as something to be named and then feared.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme, and nothing resembling a regular meter. The poem is free verse, closer to a whispered thought than a song. Almost every word is a single syllable: "I'm scared," "What if I look at you and." The longer words, "decide" and "anymore," stand out against this plain background, and they are exactly the words that carry the threat. The vocabulary is almost childlike, and that simplicity makes the speaker sound exposed. Nobody is dressing up their feelings here.
The line breaks do much of the work. "What if I look at you and" ends on a dangling "and," so the reader hangs in the air with the speaker, not knowing what the glance will bring. Then comes the short, heavy "decide that," which pauses before the verdict itself. The choice of "decide" is interesting. Lightning is not something anyone decides on; it strikes. Yet the speaker imagines ending love as a decision made in a glance, as if falling out of love could be as sudden and as involuntary as falling in. The poem leaves the reader wondering whether love is something that happens to us or something we do, and the speaker seems unsure too.
The repeated "What if" gives the middle of the poem the rhythm of anxiety. Each question tries to picture the worst and then pushes on to the next. Notice the punctuation of the last question: "What will I do then." It has a full stop, not a question mark. The earlier question, "What if that spark goes away?", still reaches upward in doubt, but this one lands flat, as though the speaker already half-knows there is no answer and has stopped expecting one. It is a small detail that makes the voice sound tired and honest.
Then the poem drops into its final line, set apart from the rest: "There is no one else for me." It can be read two ways. On the surface it is a declaration of devotion, a promise that this person is the only one. But placed directly after the fear of losing the spark, it also sounds like a trap. If the feeling dies, there is no fallback, no alternative, nobody else to turn to. The sentence is both the most romantic line in the poem and the most frightening, and the poem never says which reading is right. That ambiguity is deliberate in effect, if not necessarily in intention, and it keeps the ending from settling into comfort.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it tells the truth about happiness. We expect love poems to celebrate, but this one finds the fear that sits inside strong feeling: the more you value something, the more you dread losing it. In a few short lines and one bright, borrowed image of lightning, it shows that love can be a promise and a risk at once.