Most love poems reach for forever. This one begins by admitting that forever was never very impressive. "forever always seemed to be such a long time," the speaker says, with the shrug of someone who has heard the word promised so often it went slack. Then a small hinge of a word, "but," turns the whole sense of scale upside down: "since knowing you, there doesn't seem to be enough time at all." The central idea is that time is not a fixed measure but a feeling. Love does not lengthen the clock. It changes how much of it we think we need.
The poem is built from just two sentences, and the contrast between them does most of the work. The first is a slow, level statement of about a dozen syllables, made almost entirely of short, plain words. It sounds like a thought drifting by. The second is nearly half again as long, and it lurches forward. The speaker adds a clause about "knowing you," then backs into the complaint, then lets it trail off with the soft, deflating "at all." There is no rhyme and no regular meter, so the rhythm comes from this change in pace: a long, unhurried sentence followed by a longer, more anxious one. The structure acts out the feeling it describes, as if time itself were speeding up between the two statements.
The most interesting choices are in the small words. "forever always" is a curious pairing, since each word already means "without end." Putting them side by side stretches the idea almost comically, so that the reader feels how vast and drowsy the speaker once found eternity. That is why the reversal lands so hard. If even *forever* is not enough now, the speaker's wanting has outgrown the largest unit of time we have.
Notice also the verb "seem." The speaker says forever "seemed" long, and now time "doesn't seem" sufficient. Both claims are about perception, never about facts. The shift from the past tense "seemed" to the present "seem" quietly marks a before and after, with the meeting of "you" as the dividing line. "since" works two ways here. It marks a point in time, and it also hints at cause, as in *because of knowing you*. The speaker does not say "loving you," either. "Knowing" is humbler and more intimate. It suggests that closeness, the slow learning of another person, is what makes time feel scarce. There is a shadow in that too. To feel there is "not enough" time is to be aware that time ends, so the sweetness of the line carries a faint fear of loss.
The typography adds another layer. Everything is lowercase, and the sentences still end in full stops, so the poem reads like a message typed quickly yet punctuated with care. The slashes at the start and end are harder to pin down. Slashes usually mark line breaks when verse is quoted in running text, so here they may signal that the whole poem is a single line, a thought lifted out of a longer conversation. The title, "Untitled 098," suggests, though it cannot prove, that this is one piece in a numbered sequence, and that the poet treats each one as a fragment rather than a finished statement. The poem's refusal to name itself fits its modesty.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes one of the oldest clichés in love writing and turns it round, so that "forever" goes from a promise to a measuring stick that comes up short. It avoids ornament, too. There is no metaphor of oceans or stars, only the repeated word "time," which appears in both sentences and holds the poem together. That plainness gives the feeling an honest, spoken quality, closer to something said across a table than something performed on a page. For a student reader, it is a useful example of how a poem can be small and still complete. A single reversal, carefully timed, can carry the whole emotional weight.