Someone, or something, is at the edge of hearing, and the speaker can't decide whether to answer. Rich Mansfield's "You Can Have Them" opens on that doubt: "Not sure if what I heard was real, / just for a moment, / I thought I heard?" From there the poem becomes a tense argument with a memory, or with the person the memory belongs to. The speaker insists he is coping, but the details keep contradicting him. Its central idea is that memories can't be dismissed by willpower. The only gesture left is to hand them back, and even that keeps the other person at the centre of the poem.
The strongest imagery comes early, when the memory is turned into a restless sleeper. It begins as something "fluttering round my head," like a moth or a trapped bird, then settles into a bed that is "cold and old dead," where it goes on "tossing and turning." The image is contradictory: the memory is called dead, yet it moves, and the speaker can hear "the sheets shuffle." He closes the blinds, a small domestic act of shutting something out, but the last line of the passage undoes it: "it still burns." The bed is cold and the memory is hot. The past has gone stiff as an object but is still painful to touch.
Hearing runs through the whole poem. The speaker "heard," "can hear," and "can hear them even though I don't want to." Memories here are voices rather than pictures, and that explains why they are loudest in "the silence, / which is where I'm at now." The poem pictures thoughts as animals that "escape me / and begin to run around," then "come home though." Daytime noise lets them wander, but quiet calls them back, and the word "home" is unsettling because it suggests they belong to him, however much he resists.
The speaker's voice is defensive, and that defensiveness shows his weak spot. "I'm not lonely, / not lonely in the way you think I am" sounds like a denial, yet the qualification admits that he is lonely in some other way. "I'm not ignoring you, / I just don't want you here" is a similar half-confession, since you can only avoid someone you know is present. The word "turning" is the poem's quietest link. The memory is "tossing and turning," and a few lines later the speaker is "turning, / turning into an older man." The repetition makes the line stall, as if a thought had caught on something. The memory's restlessness and his ageing become one motion, and looking back is shown as something time does to him.
The form suits that unsettled voice. The poem is a single block of short, uneven lines, nearly every one ending in a comma, with almost no full stops. Thoughts spill into each other and nothing is allowed to finish. Rhyme appears only in scraps: "head" and "bed," "turns" and "burns," "there" and "here," "to" and "you." Each comes up like a half-remembered tune and then drops away, which fits a poem about things that surface unasked. One line, "I can hear the sheets shuffle as it tosses and turns," is noticeably longer than its neighbours, and its length mimics the restlessness it describes. The loose punctuation and informal spelling ("your there," "in it's") make the poem sound spoken or typed in the moment rather than polished, which adds to its rawness.
The title is held back until the final lines, where it turns into an action: "I give them all to you / you can have all the memories." After so much "I don't want you here," the offer sounds like release. But the last words, "all the memories I have of you," show that the gift is still defined by its owner. The speaker can pass the memories on, yet he can't describe them without naming the person. There is no full stop at the end, and no sign the handover has worked. The poem never says who "you" is, or whether the parting came through a breakup or something harder, so readers can fill the gap with their own history.
That openness, together with ordinary imagery of blinds, sheets, beds and a house at night, makes the poem easy to enter. Its value lies in its honesty about the distance between announcing that you've moved on and actually doing it.