Growing up is supposed to be a metamorphosis, and Mariposa's poem insists that for its speaker it ran in reverse. A girl who was once "momma's beautiful young butterfly" has "started growing up, and became a caterpillar." The pen name is itself a clue, since *mariposa* is Spanish for butterfly, and the speaker's lost wings feel like a lost version of the self. The title, "Puppy," never appears in the text, which makes it a puzzle worth solving. A puppy is clumsy, hungry for the world, and forgiven for its mistakes, and that is exactly the energy the speaker mourns.
The poem tracks that loss through colour. At the start there are "yellow rain boots that don't falter at the door," the boots of a child who splashes out into the weather without a second thought. They "have become timid black, scared to leave home." The boots stand in for the whole person, and the poem gives them a personality, first fearless and then shy. The palette keeps darkening: the cocoon falls away "leaving brown and gray," and the closing line mourns "my prismatic wings." Colour here means possibility, and each stage of growing up drains some of it.
The butterfly image does clever work because it is turned upside down. Normally a cocoon falling away reveals something beautiful. Here it reveals something drabber than what came before. The word "somehow" appears twice ("somehow becomes stagnant," "somehow momma's beautiful young butterfly"), and it shows a speaker who feels the change but cannot name its cause. The lines about being "above my level and progressing insanely quick" suggest she was once ahead of the curve, and that the speed itself may have turned into fear. That is my inference from the text, not something the poem spells out. The "accidents" that eat away her "childlike eagerness and creativity" are left unexplained, though the word also sits neatly beside the puppy of the title. Likewise, "kid's teeth stored away to make room for mine" reads as the adult self crowding out the child, and baby teeth are something puppies lose too.
The form matches the voice. There is no punctuation, no capital letters, no stanza breaks and no end rhyme, only fifteen lines that run on like a thought said aloud at night. The rhythm is loose and conversational, with lines of similar length and no fixed metre. The language stays casual: "insanely quick," "a bit terrified," "a bit more clearly." The repeated "a bit" is understatement, a way of keeping big feelings at arm's length. The same dry humour turns on the poem itself in "writing has felt more like complaining as of late / and maybe i'd write less if i would try trying more." The tongue-twisting "try trying" is funny and slightly self-mocking, and it admits that the poem might be an example of the problem it names. That honesty keeps the poem from sliding into self-pity.
The final three lines hold its sharpest idea. "Vintage lenses" suggests nostalgia, the way old glasses tint everything warmly. The speaker considers taking them off to "see things a bit more clearly," which sounds like the sensible, grown-up choice. But the sentence ends on a hanging "but," and the last line closes the door: "never again can i have back my prismatic wings." A prism splits plain light into colour, so the word links the lenses to the wings. Seeing clearly and seeing in colour may be opposites. If so, the speaker loses something whichever she chooses.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses the comforting story that growing up means blossoming. It offers no cure and no lesson, only a clear, funny, slightly sore picture of what it feels like to be eager and then wary. Many teenagers and young adults will recognise that feeling, and the poem gives them images for it: boots, wings, teeth, glasses. It also shows how much a poem can do without rhyme or punctuation when the images are exact and the voice is honest.