Hurt rarely announces itself neatly, and the speaker of "All in the past" doesn't try to make it neat. The poem opens with a hesitant "Hmmm...", as if she is thinking aloud and has only just noticed what she has lost. What follows is an inventory of damage: "Not as happy as I used to be / Not as funny Not as nice / Not as kind." The repeated "Not as" works like a ledger of subtractions. The missing punctuation between "funny" and "Not" makes the list tumble forward, as though the admissions are coming faster than she can control them. The cause is never explained. All we get is "This past year", which "has really murdered my senses". The vagueness is a choice, and it shifts the poem's attention from what happened to what it left behind.
"Murdered" is the most violent word in the poem, and it is aimed at "senses", not at the speaker herself. That suggests numbness more than sorrow: the hurt has dulled her capacity to feel, which is why she later pleads, "Teach me how to feel again." That plea sits uneasily beside the line just before it, "Not that you care." The poem keeps swinging between wanting to be reached and daring the listener to refuse. The "you" is never identified, so we can't say whether it is a person, a former friend or reader in general. Either way, the speaker is guarding herself while asking for help.
The imagery is built on two unlikely sources, machinery and illness. "A poorly wired circuit I have now become" turns her into a faulty device, and the inverted word order puts the image first, so the sentence ends on "become" and sounds like a verdict. A circuit is meant to carry current between things, so a badly wired one suggests failed connection, and perhaps that it might shock whoever touches it. The poem then turns to infection: "life has a funny way / Of coughing on your face / And it makes you sick." The picture is deliberately unglamorous. Nobody coughs in a face by accident in a poem about tragic beauty, and the crudeness fits her sense of being treated carelessly. The word "funny" also echoes the earlier "Not as funny". She has lost her humour, and what remains is a bitter, ironic one in which life is the joker.
The most interesting move comes at the end. She begins as the person made sick, then declares "I'm poison." The shift from victim to danger happens in two words, and it is the logic of contagion: what was done to her might now be passed on. The last line, "So love at your own risk", borrows the language of a warning label or disclaimer. Yet "love" is an imperative, so the line also works as an invitation. It is a warning that leaves the door slightly open, and the speaker seems to want someone to ignore it. Her early words, "I used to be so loving", suggest that this closing line is a defence she has built around something tender.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no regular rhythm or rhyme, and the line lengths vary a good deal, from the clipped "Not as kind" to the longer, almost conversational "See life has a funny way". This suits the casual, spoken tone. The one real sound-echo arrives at the close, where "sick" and "risk" almost rhyme, so the final lines click shut. The poem's shortest, bluntest statements, "I'm poison" and the closing warning, come last.
The title adds another layer. "All in the past" is set in guillemets, which marks it as a quotation, perhaps the sort of phrase people say to hurry someone past their pain. Judging by the poem itself, the speaker is not convinced. Her verbs slip between "used to be" and "have now become", and the damage is plainly still present. The title reads as the line she is expected to say, while the poem says otherwise.
The poem is worth reading because it doesn't tidy up. It offers no recovery or lesson, only the middle stage, when someone knows they have changed and doesn't yet know whether they can change back. It is also candid about the contradiction in that stage, which is the wish to be cared for alongside the fear of being a burden to those who try.