Before we learn what went wrong, the speaker is already crying. Nikky's poem opens at the end of the story, with tears in the very first word, and only in the fifth line does it back up to the night before, when everything looked promising. That order matters. The poem becomes less a break-up story than a record of recognition: the speaker isn't shocked by the hurt, only worn down by how familiar it is.
The title says as much. "TEARS. the return no one wanted.." puts the capitalised noun alone, then describes it as an unwelcome visitor coming back. The central idea is in that word "return": not sorrow, but sorrow again. The double dots, where a standard ellipsis would have three, make the line look typed quickly, in the middle of feeling rather than polished afterwards. That is an inference, but it suits a poem about an emotion still in progress.
The first two stanzas are twins. "Tears... staining my cheeks. / I've seen this before.." is answered by "Pain... aching in my soul. / I've felt this before." Each opens with a single word and a pause, as though the speaker needs a breath before naming it. The verbs "staining" and "aching" are present participles, so the feelings seem unfinished, still happening. "Staining" is the more interesting choice, since tears are supposed to wash things away and a stain stays. It hints that earlier episodes left marks that never fully faded. There is also a quiet move inward: from cheeks to soul, and from "seen" to "felt". At first the speaker watches the pattern like an outsider, then admits to living inside it. "Aching in my soul" is a well-worn image, and the poem doesn't depend on surprising pictures. It depends on repetition.
That repetition is as close as the poem gets to rhyme. This is free verse with no scheme, but "before" ends three lines, the two refrains and the final line, so the same sound keeps arriving like an identical rhyme. The refrain lines are nearly identical in rhythm too: five syllables, with the beats falling on "seen" (or "felt") and the last syllable of "before". Only one word changes between them, which is the point. The feeling can be renamed, but the experience stays the same.
Then the pattern breaks briefly. Line five stands alone, is the longest in the poem, and is the only line with a "you" in it: "Last night I could have sworn you were the right guy..." The idiom "could have sworn" sounds casual, yet it carries the whole drama of certainty that has just proved unreliable. The person addressed is reduced to "the right guy", a category rather than a name or a description. He sounds like a candidate for a position, which quietly suggests there may have been others. The trailing dots leave the sentence hanging, the way hope does when you half know where it's headed.
The last couplet restores the shape of the earlier ones: two lines, a hurt, a "before". The form returns just as the feeling does. "Now I see that I may not be quite sure..." commits to almost nothing. "Now I see" promises clarity, but what the speaker sees is only uncertainty, cushioned by "may", "not" and "quite". Judging by the language, the speaker is reluctant to say outright "you were wrong", perhaps because past experience has taught caution about declaring anything. Then "Just like once before." arrives with a firm full stop after so many trailing dots, as if the speaker has finally stopped arguing with the pattern.
The poem is worth studying because its structure acts out its subject. In seven lines it gives us a feeling, its history, a flicker of hope and a reversal, and the repeated "before" makes the reversal feel almost inevitable. Its insight is honest and unglamorous: the worst part of heartbreak may not be the loss itself but the déjà vu, the knowledge that you have stood in this spot already.