Few feelings embarrass us as much as one we never asked for, and "Crushing" is built around that embarrassment. The speaker has fallen for someone who is "off limits," and the poem never says why. It gives no reason and no backstory, only the guilt. Nothing is known here about who wrote it or when, so the poem has to stand on its own, and it manages that well. Its central idea is that a crush can be hated and loved at once. It is a pain the speaker would never give up.
The opening stanza shows how the poem thinks. Each line picks up the last word of the one before: "feeling / Feeling of guilt / Guilt for crushing / Crushing on you." It works like a chain, or a thought that keeps circling back, and the speaker cannot get out of it. The chain also moves from the vague word "feeling" to the blunt "you." By the fourth line the feeling has a target.
After that the language turns clipped and almost legalistic. "It's wrong / It's unexpected / It's confusing / It's unwanted" reads like the speaker listing charges against herself or himself. The repeated "It's" makes the list sound rehearsed, as if these are things said in the mind every night. The last adjective, "unwanted," is the most telling, because the feeling is unwanted by the very person feeling it.
The next two stanzas bring in a more casual voice, and the humour is deliberate. "I simp for nice guys" is current slang, and it is self-mocking. The speaker explains the crush with a shrug, as if it were a character flaw. But the logic wobbles: "You were nice to me / Like you are to everyone / And you must have done something." The speaker knows the kindness was not special, yet half-blames him anyway. "You must have done something" is the accusation of someone who cannot explain her own feelings and needs a culprit.
The emotional centre comes with "You are off limits / And in my head / I don't want you / But in my heart / I do." The short lines slow everything down. "I do" sits alone, and it also rhymes with "you." This is one of the few true end rhymes in a poem that is otherwise free verse, and it lands where the confession is hardest. For a moment the poem sounds almost like a song.
The "head vs heart" stanza escalates its vocabulary through a series of pairs: "head vs heart," "thoughts vs feelings," "mind vs soul." The "vs" turns an inner conflict into a match, and each pairing gets larger and more serious. By "soul" a schoolyard crush has become a battle of the whole self. Then comes the paradox the poem is really about: "This all / Kills me / But this all / Keep me going." "Kills me" gets a line to itself, as if the pain deserves its own space. The next line then gives the reason the speaker holds on. The slightly rough grammar of "Keep" fits the mood, because the stanza sounds spoken in a rush, not polished.
"I hate crushing / I love crushing" gives the contradiction in its barest form. The speaker calls it "a complicated relationship," and the relationship is with the feeling itself, not with the person. The poem then turns back to him with a wry understatement: "Mostly when it's you." The word "crushing" has been repeated so often that it begins to carry other meanings. A crush is an infatuation, but crushing is also what a weight does. The poem never says this outright, but the repetition makes it hard to ignore.
The ending refuses to settle things. "I hope / This crushing ends / As I hope / It becomes more." The speaker wants two opposite outcomes at once, and the poem stops without choosing. That honesty is its strength. A neater ending, where the speaker conquers the feeling or wins the person, would be less true to how these emotions actually behave.
"Crushing" matters because it takes a small, common experience seriously. It uses plain, modern language and repetition for its structure, and it lets contradiction stand without resolving it. Most readers will recognise the moment of arguing with their own feelings and losing.