Smiling is normally a sign that things are going well, but in "The times" it becomes a measuring stick. The speaker counts happiness only in moments when one particular person is missing: "the times i smile, / are the times when your no where to be found." Put that way, the poem is less a quarrel than a quiet audit of a life, with the "you" sitting in the column of subtractions. Its central idea is that another person's presence can shrink the self, so the speaker is most fully "us" only when that person is gone.
The construction does much of this work. The poem is a single stanza of seven lines, with no steady meter and almost no rhyme, so it moves like speech rather than song. Its most obvious device is repetition: "the times" runs through the first four lines, stacking up like someone ticking off examples on their fingers. Then the pattern changes. Lines five to seven all begin with "when," and the list turns into a scene: "when we can just be us, / when we can just mess around." The speaker stops counting and starts picturing.
The pronouns tell the story too. The "i" stays small and lowercase throughout, but in the middle of the poem it is joined by "we" and "us." The "you" appears only twice, in line two and in line seven, so it bookends the poem. Where the happiness lives, there is no "you" at all, yet the unwelcome person still gets the last word. The form acts out the complaint: someone kept outside the warm centre who nevertheless frames everything.
The poem's only real sound-link is between "found" in line two and "around" at the end of lines six and seven, and the repeated "around" is its sharpest moment. In line six, "mess around" is loose and playful. In line seven, "when your around" means simply being near, and the same word cancels the freedom it has just described. The hinge is "But i can't do that." "But" is also the only line opening with a capital letter, which, whether by design or habit, makes it land like a door closing.
The vocabulary is plain: "smile," "best friend," "just." That last word appears twice, in "just be us" and "just mess around," and it shows how small the speaker's wishes are. They want no adventure or escape, only ordinary ease, and that modesty makes the loss heavier. The speaker also says "can't," not "don't want to." That suggests pressure of some kind, from the other person or from the speaker's own self-protection, though the poem never says which.
The spelling is casual. "Your" stands in for "you're" twice, and "no where" is split in two. A teacher would circle these, and I would resist reading deep meaning into them. Still, the unpolished surface suits a voice that seems to be writing in the heat of the feeling, which the poem suggests rather than proves.
What stays hidden is just as interesting. We never learn who "you" is or what they do. "Another" in line three is vague, and line four sharpens it to "my best friend," as if the speaker were correcting toward the truest example. No cruelty is named and no accusation is made. That restraint leaves room for readers to supply their own situation, and many will recognise the feeling of being a slightly different person depending on who is in the room.
The poem is significant for its honesty and economy. In seven short lines it says something people often keep quiet: that someone's company can dim you, and that you can notice this most clearly by counting the times you feel light. It ends on "around" with no resolution and no wish for change, leaving the reader with what the speaker has, a smile and the knowledge of when it disappears.