Before the poem gets going, there is a murmur: "mhmmm". It is the sound of someone half-agreeing with themselves, stalling, not quite ready to say the thing. Then comes the question in guillemets, "It was love..wasnt it??", with its doubled dots, doubled question marks and missing apostrophe. The speaker seems to be typing rather than composing, and that unpolished surface is the first clue to the subject: a person checking their own memory against a verdict they never chose.
The verdict arrives in the last line. The man who leaves "showed that it wasn't love but infatuation." Before that, the speaker builds a case for the defence. Four short lines each end on the same refrain: the touches, the kisses, the holds, the tears, "it was love". The repetition works like someone counting evidence on their fingers, and it is slightly too insistent. Anyone who has to say something four times is partly trying to convince themselves. The poem's grammar tracks this wobble. The opening is a question ("wasn't it"), the list is a run of flat assertions, and then the question comes back as "not enough, was it?", now turned against the speaker's own argument.
The list is carefully ordered. "Touches" and "kisses" are what we expect from a love poem. "Holds" is stranger: a verb borrowed as a noun, where "hugs" or "embraces" would be more usual. It hints at clinging and holding on, and it quietly foreshadows what happens when the holding stops. The list ends on "the tears", which tips it from pleasure into pain. The speaker's evidence of love therefore includes hurt, and the poem never says whose tears they are. That ambiguity lets us hear both people in the relationship, even though only one of them speaks.
There is no rhyme and no fixed metre. The rhythm comes from the refrain and the clipped line lengths, which tap along like a pulse. Then the pattern breaks. "But it wasn't enough" is the hinge, and the closing two lines are the longest in the poem, running on without any refrain to steady them. One echo survives, though. "It was love" returns as "like it was the easiest thing to do". The same small phrase, "it was", now describes his ease instead of their feeling, and the two are set side by side without comment.
The poem has almost no metaphor. Its imagery is bodily: touching, kissing, holding, crying, and then a single movement, "walked away". Closeness is told through contact and its end through distance. The simile "like it was the easiest thing to do" is the sharpest moment, because it measures love by cost. The speaker paid in tears, while he, as it appears from where the speaker stands, paid nothing. The final line's logic follows from that: if leaving was easy, the feeling can't have been real.
Whether that logic is sound is worth asking. Ease of leaving proves very little about how deeply someone felt, and the poem may be showing us a mind reaching for an explanation rather than a fact. "Infatuation" is a cool, almost clinical word dropped in after all that warm repetition of "love". The last line also has no question mark. The speaker has stopped asking, but the poem leaves open whether that is acceptance or a defensive way of ending the argument.
The poem matters because it catches a very recognisable moment: the aftermath, when someone audits their own past and lets the other person's behaviour rewrite it. Its strength lies in its lack of polish. The stumbling punctuation, the spaces before commas and the whispered "mhmmm" make it feel like thought caught mid-sentence, not feeling tidied into verse. The poem doesn't resolve the question it opens, and the reader is left with the speaker's problem: how do you judge something that was real to you when the other person acts as if it was never that much?