Three asterisks stand where a title should be, as if the experience at the centre of this poem has no name that fits. The speaker looks back on childhood abuse by someone who was "suppose to protect me", and on the long aftermath. The vocabulary is blunt: "Manipulated, trained, groomed." The central idea is that this kind of harm does not end when the abuse does. It carries on through disbelief, through enforced silence, and through a self that has to be rebuilt from whatever is left.
The poem is built like a history, moving from "It started at innocense" through years of concealment to a present that still hurts. Notice who acts in the first half: almost never the speaker. The verbs are passive or come from outside: "Called a liar", "Told to shove it down", "Shoved in a box". Even "Choice a matter of fiction" removes agency in a handful of words, treating choice as something that exists only in stories. The idea returns later as a ledger of theft: "So many firsts taken / So many choices taken". The ledger also counts what cannot be seen, such as "who I could have been".
The central image is the box. At first it is something done to the speaker's pain, which is "stored out of sight". Words like "hidden", "smothered" and "unseen" gather around it until secrecy feels physical, like a lid pressed down. Then the image turns to liquid: "Pressure over filling, the box spilling out", and finally "the thoughts and the feelings bubble up and spill over." The logic is quietly persuasive. What was forced into hiding does not disappear, and silence only lets the pressure build. The verb "shove" also echoes across the poem, first as an order ("shove it down") and then as something endured ("Shoved in a box"), so an instruction from outside seems to become the way the speaker has to live.
The most unsettling line is "Our little secret, our own little world, special." The abuser's voice seems to slip into the poem here. The shared "our" and the small, soft "little" show how grooming dresses control up as closeness, and "special" is left alone at the end, flat and ironic. Just before it, the speaker reclaims "my body", "my feelings, my mind", a rare run of first-person possessives in a poem where so much has been taken. Soon after, the poem turns to "you" for the only time, in "to take what you wanted", a brief accusation before the focus returns to the speaker.
The form suits this. There is no rhyme and no regular beat, and the lines vary a great deal in length. Almost nothing is punctuated, so thoughts run into one another. The only two full stops come after "out of sight" and "never ending", one tied to hiding and the other to endlessness. The pattern "Unable to deal with, unable to sit with, unable to open up" stumbles forward in three beats, and each phrase leaves its object unnamed. What the speaker cannot deal with or sit with is never said outright, which mirrors the difficulty of saying it. Small physical details, such as "tears and fidgeting", make that difficulty visible. The line "Trying so hard to just exist, to want to exist" is perhaps the saddest, because the second "exist" shows that even the wish to live has been damaged.
The poem refuses a comforting ending. Its last line, "the spiral and cycle continues, never ending", returns to the pressure and spilling it has already described, so the form itself circles back. Some spelling and word slips ("innocense", "morn", "cant") leave the writing unpolished. Whether or not they were intended, they make it feel closer to testimony than to performance, and its force comes from directness rather than polish.
That directness is where the poem's significance lies. The speaker says they were "Not allowed to express or talk about" what happened, and the poem is an act of speaking anyway. It shows young readers how the effects of abuse can be described in terms of lost choice, enforced silence and time that does not heal on its own. It also invites the kind of listening that the speaker was denied.