Some words get used so often that nobody checks what they weigh. Nikky's "Always" picks up one of them, turns it over like a coin of doubtful value, and asks the question the boy in the poem never stops to ask.
The first line sets the tone: "Always is such a funny word." It sounds like something said with a shrug, in an ordinary voice. But "funny" is slippery. It can mean amusing, or it can mean odd and not quite trustworthy, as in "something funny is going on." The poem never says which it intends, and that ambiguity stays with us through the rest of the lines. Notice, too, that "always" appears in the title and in every one of the four lines. The poem circles the word and can't leave it alone, much as a person keeps pressing on a bruise to see whether it still hurts.
The second line is the loudest thing in the poem. "I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU" is in capitals and carries no quotation marks, so the promise seems to burst out of the narration itself. Its rhythm is heavy, almost every word taking a stress, like someone insisting. Then comes the flat, stage-direction calm of "The boy tells the girl." The shout is followed by a shrug, and the gap between them does a lot of the poem's work. The characters are "the boy" and "the girl," not named people, which turns them into types. This could be any boy and any girl, which suggests the scene is a familiar one.
Structurally, the poem is tiny and unrhymed. Nothing chimes at the line-ends, and perhaps that is the point: a rhyme would give a comforting sense of closure, and this poem refuses to offer any. Instead the lines change shape. The first is light and conversational, the second thuds, and the third, "But how long is always?", is short and plain, close to the way a child might ask. That simplicity is deceptive. The question is not hard to say, but it is nearly impossible to answer.
The fourth line is where the poem does its most careful damage. It builds a ladder of time: "a day, a week, a month? A year, a decade." Each step is bigger than the last, and we expect the climb to end somewhere grand, perhaps at "forever." Instead the line stumbles. The ellipsis acts like a hesitation, a breath before an unwelcome thought, and then comes "or just a few hours..." The little word "just" does the harm. It shrinks the grandest word in the language down to part of an evening. The line begins with large units of time and ends with a small one, so the movement is downward, a promise losing altitude as we read.
The poem also stops without a full stop. The ellipsis leaves the sentence hanging, and since the question is never answered, we are left in the same uncertainty as the speaker. We can't tell who that speaker is. It might be the girl, an onlooker, or the boy himself years later. The poem doesn't say, and judging by the wry, slightly guarded tone, that openness seems deliberate. Notably, the poem never calls the boy a liar. He may mean every word at the moment he says it. What it questions is the word itself, which promises infinity when human feeling is usually measured in much smaller units.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It captures a gap everyone eventually notices, between how a feeling sounds when it is spoken and how long it actually lasts. Its own brevity adds to the effect: a poem of four lines, standing in for a promise that might be just as short. It asks us to be a little suspicious of big words, and also a little kinder to the people who say them, since in the moment of speaking, "always" can feel completely true.