An apology normally asks for forgiveness. The speaker of "I'm Sorry" ends by asking for the opposite, and the whole short poem is built so that this last request feels like the most honest thing in it.
The scene is small. Two people are stranded after school, probably in December, talking about the future. That is all the memory the speaker can offer, and they keep apologising for how thin it is: "It's been like a year or something," "I regret I don't remember," "My mistake, my memory is terrible." The vagueness is almost comic, since "like a year or something" is how someone talks when pretending not to care about exact dates. But it sets up a quiet contradiction. A speaker with a "terrible" memory still recalls precisely what the other person wore: "the boots and jacket on... the ones you always wear." What survives is not a date or a sentence but an outfit, the kind of detail you keep only about someone you were watching closely. The speaker insists on forgetting, and the poem lets us notice how much they remember.
The form is a run of six couplets followed by one line left alone. The rhymes are loose, as if the poem is only half trying. "Something" and "remember" chime faintly, and so do "together" and "December." The one clean rhyme, "shit" and "it," lands exactly where the poem turns: "We were talking future shit / Now we're fucking losing it." Those two short lines carry the whole story. The tense flips from "were talking" to "Now we're," and the swearing sharpens from casual to raw. "Losing it" can mean losing patience or sanity, or losing each other, and the poem doesn't choose.
After that line the register changes. The easy slang gives way to stiff, careful words: "I recount," "Apologies, for I wish I could give you what you want from me." It sounds like someone putting on a more formal voice because the conversation has become serious, or because politeness is easier to hide behind. The tangled line about giving the other person "what you want from me" is also the poem's biggest gap. We are never told what that is. Judging by the rest of the poem, it is some affection or commitment the speaker can't supply, and leaving it unnamed makes the refusal feel heavier.
The next couplet sounds like a slogan: "Honestly, honesty is key." The wordplay is almost glib, and the hyperbole that follows, "I would die before I lie to to you," stumbles on its doubled "to." The slip may be accidental, but on the page it reads like speech that trips as it overstates. The speaker is protesting too much, and the final line shows why.
"I'm sorry, but I hope you hate me" is the only line with no hedge in it, no "probably" and no "something." It is also set apart from every couplet before it, and it quietly rhymes with "key," so honesty and its consequence are tied together across the gap. The word "but" does the real damage. Usually a "sorry, but" is the start of an excuse. Here it reveals what the speaker wants: hatred is cleaner than lingering hope. We can read it as a kindness that would let the other person leave without guilt. We can also read it as self-punishment, or as a way to avoid the harder task of being forgiven. The poem leaves all three open.
What makes it worth reading is how little it decorates. There is almost no figurative language, only that one detail of boots and a jacket worn on a cold afternoon. Instead the poem relies on rhythm, shifts in tone, and a final line that undoes its own title. It shows how an apology can be a way of asking to be let go.