A heartbeat is the one sound we are meant never to notice. It works best when we forget it. Nikky's short poem starts from that ordinary fact and makes it uneasy. The speaker's forgetting may be more than inattention. It may be something wanted.
The first stanza sets out the pattern the whole poem follows: a statement, a retraction, then an admission. "Sometimes I forget it's there" is calm and almost casual. The next line undercuts it: "Then again maybe it's not?" The question mark matters, because a heartbeat that isn't there would mean there is no life at all, yet the speaker asks it lightly, as if it were a passing thought. The third line drops the question mark and settles on a full stop: "Or is it just that I wish it's not." This is the only firm punctuation in the stanza, and it carries the confession. The grammar is also worth noticing. A more standard phrasing would be "I wish it weren't," but the poem says "wish it's not," pressing the wish and the fact into one clause. Whether that is deliberate or not, the effect suits the speaker, who can no longer tell what is true from what is hoped for.
The second stanza mirrors the first but changes the subject. The question is no longer whether the heartbeat exists but whether it hurts. "My heartbeat I forget it hurts.." has no comma to separate its two thoughts, so it tumbles forward, and its two dots are neither a full stop nor a proper ellipsis. The line trails off before it is finished. Then the retraction comes again, "But then again maybe it doesn't," followed by the admission: "Or maybe it's just I wish it didn't..." This time the grammar is tidy. "Didn't" openly admits that the wish runs against reality. The poem ends on three dots rather than a full stop, so it never settles the matter.
Read together, the stanzas suggest a progression. Wishing a heartbeat away is a huge wish, but wishing that it merely stopped hurting is smaller and easier to understand. The poem seems to hint that the two wishes are connected, and that the first may be only the second at its most desperate. That is an inference from the text, not something the poem says outright, and the poem leaves the connection unspoken.
The sound and shape of the poem support this hesitation. There is no conventional rhyme, but there is a kind of rhyme by repetition: "not" closes two lines in a row in the first stanza, so the sound comes back without getting anywhere, like the speaker going in circles. In the second stanza "doesn't" and "didn't" echo each other with the same shape and a changed tense, a small step from what is to what is wished. The lines are short and uneven and sound like speech, and the hedging phrases "then again" and "maybe" keep recurring. That back-and-forth of claim and counter-claim behaves a little like a pulse, which is fitting for a poem about one.
There is almost no visual imagery. The only image is the heartbeat itself, which can't be seen, only felt and half-heard. The poem leans on small, plain words. "There" turns the heartbeat into a presence in the room, something that can be present or absent. "Forget" appears in both stanzas and does double work, as symptom and as strategy: forgetting is what the speaker does, and what the speaker may want. The poem also never decides whether the heart is literal or figurative. The same lines can describe a body being noticed or a heart that aches, and that openness is part of the poem's pull.
The significance of the poem lies in its restraint. There are no grand metaphors, no exclamation marks and no plot. Nothing in the text says who is speaking or why, and the poem is stronger for leaving that blank, since readers fill the gap with their own experience. What it captures precisely is how a person bargains with a feeling, by doubting it, then doubting the doubt, then admitting what they would prefer. The poem refuses comfort at the end, and the trailing dots leave the reader still listening for the pulse.