Four lines are enough for Maria to set a small trap and walk straight into it. The speaker wants someone, "him," to understand how she feels about him. By the end she has realised the obstacle is not his failure to listen but her own failure to know. The central idea is that you cannot hand over a feeling you haven't yet worked out for yourself. The poem is a little act of self-discovery that happens as we read it.
The construction is simple and clever. The first two lines open with the same word, "wish," and the repetition makes the longing sound almost like a refrain. But the lines are not identical. In the first, the speaker hopes "he could understand," which puts all the work on him. In the second she says "i could make him understand," and now she wants to be the one acting. The wish has moved from waiting to doing, and the poem seems to be heading toward a plan. Then it turns away from one.
The hinge is the "but" at the start of line three. Up to that point the speaker has been looking outward at his failure to see her. Now she looks sideways and finds a likeness: "just like him im indecisive." The phrase "just like him" is a quiet shock, because the person she wanted to be understood by turns out to be her mirror. The word "indecisive" is also the longest and most clinical word in the poem, a label that sounds almost like a diagnosis. It is striking that she reaches for it so calmly, as if she has been circling the problem for a while.
The last line completes the logic of the poem. "I can't make someone understand when i don't either." Here the earlier "could make him understand" returns as "can't make someone understand," and the small change from "could" to "can't" is the poem's whole emotional movement. Notice too that "him" has become "someone." The speaker steps back from this one person and states a general rule, as though she is comforting herself with a truth that applies to everyone. The poem also ends on "either," a word that points back to something already said. It tells us she is in the same fog as him, and it leaves the sentence hanging rather than resolved. The final line is also the longest, and its extra length suits a thought that gets tangled as it goes.
The verbal texture supports this. "Understand" appears three times in four lines, and the repetition is ironic: a poem about failing to understand cannot stop saying the word. Meanwhile the feeling itself, the thing that supposedly needs explaining, is never named. We get "how i feel about him" and nothing more specific, so the reader is left as uninformed as the "him" in the poem. That silence looks deliberate, or at least it is true to the situation, because the speaker has no word to give.
There is no rhyme and no fixed metre, and the lines have the uneven length of ordinary speech. The lowercase "i," the missing apostrophe in "im" (while "can't" keeps its own), and the absence of any punctuation give it the feel of something jotted down quickly, or a thought typed before it could be edited. That is an inference from the page, but the effect is clear: the poem sounds unpolished and therefore believable. Punctuation would have fenced the thoughts into tidy statements, and without it they slide into one another the way confused feelings do.
The title, three asterisks standing in for a name, also fits. The poem does not claim to be finished or important, and neither does it name its subject. That modesty is part of its appeal.
Its significance lies in this honesty. Many poems about unspoken feelings blame distance, timing or the other person. This one blames the speaker's own uncertainty, and it does so without drama or self-pity. In a few plain words it shows that being misunderstood can begin with not yet understanding yourself, which is a more uncomfortable and more useful insight than most longer poems manage.