Nearly every line of "I wonder (random)" is a question the speaker cannot ask aloud. She opens with "I worry," says it twice, then slides into "I wonder," and she keeps circling because she has no information. How is the child feeling today? What would they say if they saw her? How is school going? The poem is addressed to a "you" she left, and everything in it is built on absence. Nothing is answered. The parenthetical "random" in the title suggests a thought jotted down, but the way the poem keeps returning to the same few feelings looks anything but random.
Nothing reliable is known to me about Missy May, so the "I" here is best treated as the voice the poem creates. That voice is a mother, judging by the lines about carrying the child "in my body for nine months." Her worries are small and daily: school, mood, dreams. "I'm not there to help you" is the quietest and most painful line, because it concerns not the grand fact of leaving but the ordinary help she can no longer give. The memory of pregnancy brings the poem's one burst of physical tenderness. "Flitter" is a light, quick word, like a bird or a moth, and it makes the unborn child small and alive. The line runs long, as if she is reluctant to let the memory end.
The grammar is nonstandard: "if you seen me," "dreams was too much," "You was my light." This gives the poem the sound of speech rather than composition. It feels unedited, which makes the confession harder to dismiss as performance. The spelling "bare" for "bear" is probably a slip, but it fits: "too much to bare" carries a sense of nakedness, and the poem itself is bare.
There is no regular meter. Lines vary in length and read more like a letter than a song. Yet there is exactly one rhyme, "bare" and "despair," at the end of the first stanza. It arrives where she remembers holding the child through bad dreams, the one moment when she was present and needed, and the language briefly clicks into order. After that the rhyme vanishes, as the closeness did.
The most telling movement is in the verbs. Early on she says, "Life was taking from me that day I left you." Life is the agent and she is the one acted upon, and "was taking" makes it sound like something ongoing that happened to her. Near the end the grammar changes: "No words can take back what I took from you." Now the subject is "I," and the verb is blunt and past tense. The poem moves from explanation toward ownership. In between sits "I do love you!", the only exclamation mark until the end, which sounds half like a plea and half like a defence.
The two shortest lines, "I will wait for you, / You will come," stand apart with white space around them. They are in the future tense and sound certain, almost like a prayer or an instruction. Then comes the image "I'm sorry will spill over and over." The apology becomes a liquid that cannot be contained, and "over and over" echoes the poem's own habit of repeating itself. Turning "I'm sorry" into something that spills also hints that it never reaches the person it is meant for.
The ending undoes the certainty. "I wonder if you still love me" is followed by an indented, capitalised "DO YOU??" The calm wondering of the opening cracks into a shout, and the doubled question mark shows she cannot hold her composure. Earlier she wondered about school and feelings. The question underneath was this one all along.
The poem matters because it gives voice to a parent who left, without turning her into a villain or a victim. Guilt, love, hope and fear all sit side by side, and none cancels the others. Its roughness is part of its force. It does not sound polished or defended, and it leaves its last question open, so a reader is left in the same place as the speaker: waiting for an answer that only the child can give.