Nine feelings, nine verdicts, and not one of them accepted at face value. In rainyday_artist24's «emotions», a speaker hands over what looks like a glossary of the human heart, then makes clear that the definitions belong to someone else: "according to my family." The central idea is invalidation. In this household, as the speaker reports it, a feeling is never a reasonable response to anything. It is a symptom of something wrong with the person having it, or a performance put on for attention.
The most telling words may be the ones in brackets. "Here are my emotions (or rather, their causes)" is a dry self-correction. What follows is not a list of feelings but a list of explanations, and the explanations skip past whatever actually happened to the speaker and land on the speaker's character. The colon after each emotion works like a dictionary entry or a ledger: term, then ruling. The form promises objectivity and delivers dismissal. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are clipped and flat, closer to a note stuck on a fridge than a lyric, and the flatness is the point. The speaker never argues back, and that restraint suggests the verdicts have been heard so often they can simply be recited.
Look closely at the verbs. Anger, boredom, fear and trust are all explained with "being": "being irrational/just being hateful in general," "being moody," "being paranoid," "being naive." These are charges against personality, as if you feel this way because of what you are. The rest use verbs of pretending: sadness is "playing the victim," surprise is "faking it," apathy is "trying to act like a parent," anticipation is "over-hyping." These are charges of acting, as if you feel this way because you want something. Between them, the two groups close every exit. A feeling is either a defect or a fraud, and it can never simply be true.
Even the pleasant emotions get no mercy. "happy: high" is the shortest entry, and its ambiguity does a lot of work. It could mean intoxicated or merely too cheerful, but either way happiness is treated as suspicious, something that needs accounting for. The grammar also shifts partway through. The first five entries are adjectives (happy, sad, angry, bored, scared), and the last four become abstract nouns (apathy, trust, surprise, anticipation). The list moves from everyday moods toward something more like qualities of a mind, and the entries grow stranger. "apathy: trying to act like a parent" is hard to decode. Judging by the wording, the speaker's detachment gets read as bossiness, but the puzzle is part of the effect, because family labels often make little sense from outside.
The rhythm builds quietly. Early verdicts are one to three words and land like slaps. By the end, the ruling has stretched into "over-hyping something not worth anyone's time," the longest line on the page. Anticipation is the emotion that looks forward, and the family's response is to deflate it before it starts. The phrase "not worth anyone's time" is the cruelest in the poem because it stops judging the feeling and starts judging the speaker's hopes as an imposition on other people. Ending there, with no comment, leaves the impression of someone learning to expect little and to want even less out loud.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with how little. It borrows the cold format of a chart to show something painful, and it lets the reader do the emotional arithmetic. Anyone who has been told they were "just being dramatic" will recognise the pattern at once. The poem is also careful. "According to" means the speaker reports the family's views without claiming they are wrong, yet the sheer uniformity of the verdicts, with no feeling ever allowed to be sincere, makes them hard to trust. By writing the list down, the speaker takes back ownership of the feelings the family would not grant. The lowercase title offers them plainly as emotions, which is what they were all along.