Three asterisks stand where a title should be, and the choice fits a poem about something that can't quite be named. Nothing is known here about who "paul" is or when the poem was written, so everything below comes from the words on the page. They are enough. The poem is a portrait of unequal feeling: one person stands outside another, wanting in, and can find no way through.
It begins with great delicacy. The speaker walks "around" the sleeping figure "carefully," as if circling something fragile or dangerous. "Sleeping state" is a curious phrase, a little clinical, and it could mean literal sleep or an emotional unawareness. The sleeper's appearance makes "everything so clear," and what is clear is bad news. Then comes the poem's most revealing moment. The speaker tries to define "good" and gets tangled: "Good is when all is well, and all is not well." The sentence contradicts itself, and it reads like a mind trying to argue its way to calm and failing. The next lines try again, more coldly, with the language of a contract: "both parties" should "feel the same way." The verdict arrives in a fragment, "you don't - I do," where the dash works like a wall between two short clauses. The question that follows, "what is there to say," has no question mark. The speaker doesn't seem to expect an answer.
The middle of the poem is its most unsettling stretch. "There are no holes in you that i can use to my advantage!" The imagery turns the other person into a sealed building, and the speaker into someone checking the walls for a weakness. "Advantage" is an uncomfortably honest word, because it admits that wanting someone can sound like wanting to get at them. The lowercase "i" and the exclamation mark make the line sound blurted rather than composed. The jealousy sharpens in the next one: "you stay closed. / Maybe you unlock for others!" The lock-and-door metaphor is now complete, and the second exclamation mark sounds bitter, close to a laugh.
Then the poem changes direction, and the tone changes with it. "You leave me wondering, craving, starving" climbs from curiosity to appetite to near-collapse in three words, and "craving" and "starving" echo each other almost like a rhyme. From here the verbs are all commands: "Feed me," "save me," "Crash into me, hollow me and then fill me up." The reversal is striking. Earlier the speaker searched the other person for holes; now he asks to become the hollow one. The violence of "crash" and "hollow" suggests he would rather be emptied out than stay shut out. The phrases "from within" and "all around" also show him pleading for rescue from every direction at once.
The ending is the plainest writing in the poem: "Just be. / Be near and be for me." After all the argument, imagery and bitterness, the language shrinks to short, one-syllable words. "Near" also quietly answers "clear" from the second line, the one place where the poem comes close to rhyme, and it answers the "outside" of the earlier lines. The last request is ambiguous. "Be for me" could mean "be on my side," or it could mean "be mine," and the poem doesn't choose.
Formally, the poem keeps no regular meter and no rhyme scheme. Long, explaining lines gradually give way to fragments, as though the speaker's reasoning wears down as his need grows. The poem moves in three steps: observation, accusation, then plea.
What makes it worth reading is that refusal to tidy up. The speaker isn't noble or wise about being unloved. He is confused, a little resentful, even calculating, and then simply desperate. A poem that lets all those feelings stand side by side, awkward and contradictory, feels truer than one that settles on a single, dignified emotion.