The last train home is meant to be about arriving, but in Olivia Taylor's "Try too Much" it is really about going back. The speaker rides it "mainly because it reminded me of / Countless sleepless nights / Watching the sunset / From your couch." In eleven short lines, a commute becomes a memory, and the memory becomes a question the speaker can't answer: why keep phoning someone who never picks up?
The opening is slightly backwards. We expect people to take a train in order to get somewhere, yet this speaker takes it for what it stirs up. "Last" seems to do double work. It is the last train of the night, but it also hints at a last attempt, a last thread to something that has ended. Line 2 is the longest in the poem and breaks off on the dangling "of", so the sentence has to spill into the next line, much as a thought slides into a memory. After that the lines shrink: "Countless sleepless nights," "Watching the sunset," "From your couch." The memory is made of plain things, a sofa and the evening light, but "countless" and "sleepless" share their "-less" ending, which makes the nights sound both endless and restless. A sunset is also an image of something closing, and in light of what follows it feels like quiet foreshadowing.
Then comes "Now I don't know." The line break after "know" leaves the admission hanging before "Why I still call your phone." The grammar shifts too, from the past of "took" and "reminded" to the present of "call" and "decline." The past is where the two people shared a couch, and the present is one-sided. The poem's bluntest moment follows: "Everytime I try / You decline." "Decline" is exactly the word a phone screen uses, but it also means to weaken and fall away, which echoes the sunset. At three syllables, "You decline" is the shortest line, and with no punctuation after it, it runs straight into "It's just so stupid." The refusal and the self-reproach arrive without a breath between them.
Taylor mostly avoids obvious rhyme, so the few chimes stand out. "Home" and "phone" are a near rhyme that links the train ride to the unanswered calls. "Decline" and "mine" are a full rhyme, and they close the poem. The refusal and the longing land on the same sound, as if the speaker can't say one without hearing the other. Possessives matter here as well. The speaker's world is full of the other person's things, "your couch," "your phone," and only in the last word reaches for ownership: "mine." Even that comes in the conditional, "you'd ever be mine." The word "ever" suggests, as an inference from the text, that this person was never really the speaker's, which would make the hope older and sadder than the calls. The diction supports this. "Just so stupid" is plain, almost teenage self-scolding, and "just" tries to shrink a feeling that clearly hasn't shrunk.
The title, "Try too Much," never appears in the poem, but "try" in line 8 is its nearest echo. It reads like a verdict that someone, perhaps another person, perhaps the speaker, might pass on all this effort. The poem doesn't say whose voice it is, and that ambiguity is useful. We hear the speaker judging themselves while still doing the very thing they judge.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it does, and how well. There is no dramatic scene, only a train, a couch in memory, and a call that goes unanswered. Yet it captures a recognisable embarrassment: hope that carries on after the evidence has gone against it. Its short lines, everyday words, and one carefully placed rhyme let the feeling come through without decoration. For a student of poetry, it shows that a poem doesn't need elaborate language to be built with care. Here the placement of a single word, "mine," at the end of a single line does most of the work.