Eight short lines, not a single full stop, and a speaker who sounds as if every word is tested before it is allowed to bear weight. "Untitled 101" describes the awkward middle of getting over someone: no longer in the first shock of heartbreak, not yet healed. It opens with a statement of caution, "Taking things / slowly / hesitantly", and only in the final line reveals what the caution is protecting. Its central idea is that slowness here is not strength or wisdom but a symptom, a way of living with feelings that haven't finished.
The line breaks do much of the work. Putting "slowly" and "hesitantly" on separate lines makes the reader slow down too, so the form acts out what the words claim. The two words are not quite synonyms. "Slowly" describes a pace, while "hesitantly" describes a feeling, a flinch of fear. In moving from one to the other, the speaker admits that this isn't a calm decision to take it easy. It's reluctance.
The grammar is equally guarded. "Taking things" and "Don't want to hurt" both leave out the subject, as if the speaker can't yet claim these feelings outright. The first "I" doesn't appear until line five, and then only inside a subordinate clause: "the way I have been". That phrase is the poem's most interesting ambiguity. The present perfect "have been" means the hurt isn't over, since it stretches from the past into now. It also leaves open who might be hurt. The speaker could be protecting themselves from repeating old pain, or could be thinking of someone new, a person with whom things are being taken slowly. The poem never says, and the vagueness suits a mind that is still sorting out its own motives.
The final three lines are the cleverest. "Cause as much as I wish / I could say it" withholds its object. "It" hangs at the line break until the reader supplies the obvious answer, "I'm over you." Then the last line delivers the opposite: "I'm not fully over you yet." The speaker manages to say the thing by confessing they can't say its reverse. The casual "Cause", with its dropped first letter, keeps this sounding like speech, something muttered to a friend or to oneself, rather than a composed statement.
The hedges in that last line matter. "Not fully" admits to partial progress, so the speaker is somewhere on the way, and "yet" quietly expects an end to the story. It is also the longest line in the poem, at eight syllables against the two-word and four-syllable fragments earlier. After all the short, careful steps, the confession finally gets room to stretch. The poem has no rhyme, and a neat chime would have tidied a feeling that is meant to stay untidy. Instead the -ly endings of "slowly" and "hesitantly" return in "fully", linking the opening vow to the closing admission. Capital letters mark three beginnings, a stance, a fear and a reason, and the lack of a final full stop leaves "yet" open.
Imagery is sparse, but what there is works hard. "Taking things" suggests handling something fragile. "Over you" borrows a spatial metaphor, getting over as crossing an obstacle, and "not fully over" implies one foot still on the far side. The title is simply a number, which suggests one piece in a longer run of untitled work, though the poem itself doesn't tell us. The name above it, a row of consonants with the vowels stripped out, might be read as a nod to the poem's habit of leaving things unsaid. That is only an inference, but it fits.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a stage most love poems skip. Many poems about endings either grieve loudly or announce recovery. This one stays in the unglamorous middle, where you can know you're being careful without being able to say why until the last moment. It also shows how little a poem needs to make that feeling believable: a few plain words, a carefully placed line break and a final line that admits what the first seven were trying to avoid.