Before it says anything about wounds or endings, the poem says something about love, and how little of it there was. "Her mumma used to tell her that she loved her" is in the past tense, so the reassurance has stopped. The next line, "Her daddy annually," is barely a sentence, but the single word "annually" does the work. A father's affection that arrives once a year, like a birthday or a tax return, is hardly affection at all. By the end of the first stanza the speaker has turned all this into a verdict on herself: "Shes a broken down, broken thing." The repetition of "broken" sounds like a mind going round a thought it cannot get out of, and "thing" turns a person into an object. The missing apostrophe in "Shes" leaves the writing raw and unpolished, as if it was never meant to be tidied up.
The poem also changes its grammar partway through. It begins at a distance, with "her" and "she," as if the speaker is describing someone else, which suggests a kind of numbness. In the second stanza that distance collapses into "me." The stanza opens with a question, "What is wrong with me?", and closes with a harsher version of it, "What isn't wrong with me?" That small swap from "is" to "isn't" shows how far the self-judgment has spread: she no longer looks for one flaw but assumes everything about her is one. Between the two questions sits the poem's most unsettling rhythm, "One cut, two cut, cut a little deep." It is a counting chant, close to a skipping rhyme, and the childlike cadence makes the content worse. The poem gives no gory detail. The sing-song counting is enough to suggest something repeated and habitual.
The third stanza is the emotional centre. "If I was born a boy, would you have cared for me?" is a bitter little experiment in imagining, and it hints that she senses she was valued less for being who she is. The stanza then moves from that wish to "Maybe I shouldn't have been born at all," and on to the poem's key word, "burden," in the line "Then you would be free, of the burden we call me." Look at that "we." The label is shared, so she is not only being called a burden by others but has taken the name on herself. The comma that breaks the line before "of the burden" works like a held breath, or a moment of release, and the stanza makes her disappearance sound like a gift to other people.
The final stanza turns the poem's grim logic into a list. The questions are clipped, with no explanation between them, and the speaker follows them with "So many options." The phrase is flat and ironic, the language of a shop or a menu applied to the worst possible subject. It ends on "To get rid of me," where she describes herself as something to be disposed of, finishing the shift from person to "thing" that began in the first stanza. The poem does not resolve, and it offers no comfort or turn toward hope. It simply stops.
The poem's sound reinforces this. It has no regular metre or planned rhyme scheme, but the last three stanzas all end on the same sound, "me," and "free" falls into the same pattern. The speaker cannot stop circling back to herself, which is both the problem and the only thing left to talk about. We know nothing about "mouse" beyond the name, and the lowercase pseudonym suggests someone who wants to stay small and unnoticed, though that is only a guess from the text.
What makes the poem worth reading, and worth discussing carefully, is how clearly it shows a pattern of thought. The speaker starts from not being loved enough and ends convinced she is the cause. The real question under "What is wrong with me?" seems to be "Why wasn't I loved?" The poem shows how painfully easy it is to answer that wrongly. Feeling like a burden is a feeling, and it is not a fact, however convincing it sounds from the inside. If any part of this poem sounds like your own thoughts, tell a trusted adult, a school counsellor, or a local helpline. Saying it out loud is the first step in finding out you are not the burden you have been told you are.