The old saying goes that you never know what you have until it's gone, and people usually bring it out as a warning once the damage is done. Penelope's speaker does something stranger and turns the saying into an experiment. The poem agrees with the proverb for half a sentence, then swerves: "but somtimes I want you to leave so badly." The reason is not anger. It is curiosity, a wish to "see if what I had was really the best I can get." Leaving becomes a test, and the poem's central idea is the uncomfortable thought that someone can be so unsure of their own relationship that they would risk losing it just to measure it.
The title, «You dont know what you have», sounds like an accusation aimed at a partner who takes things for granted. Once the poem is read through, the accusation boomerangs. The person who cannot tell what they have is the speaker. There is also a small shift in tense. The title says "have," but the body of the poem speaks of what "I had," as if the relationship were already being looked back on from a distance.
The word choices carry a lot of this. The speaker doesn't say "the one I love" or "the person I deserve," but "the best I can get." "Best" implies a ranking, as if other options were lined up for comparison. "Get" makes the whole thing sound like a purchase, and "can" admits limits, a quiet doubt about how much the speaker is allowed to hope for. The word "really" appears twice, in "dont really know" and "was really the best," and each time it signals a suspicion that appearances might be hiding something truer. The sounds echo the idea. "Gone," "get" and "got" are three hard g-words that trace a small arc from loss to acquisition to receiving. What the speaker finally "got" is not an answer but "silence."
The form helps. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the poem is just two sentences of thirty-five and fifteen words. The first is a long run-on, held together by "but" and "just so" and almost no punctuation. It sounds like a thought that cannot stop circling, each clause justifying the one before. The second sentence is shorter and plainer, made mostly of one-syllable words, and it lands on "silence" like a door closing. The break between the two sentences works as a pause in which no one answers. The casual spelling ("dont," "its," "somtimes") and the wavering between "I" and "i" suggest a voice that is unedited, closer to a message typed in one go than to a polished lyric. Whether or not that was deliberate, it makes the confession feel raw rather than composed.
The most interesting detail is the question. We are told that the speaker asked "a question looking for an answer," but never what the question was. We get only its shape, so the reader is left in the speaker's position, asking into a void. That silence is itself a kind of answer, and it is a cruel irony. The speaker wants the other person to leave in order to learn what absence feels like, and here is absence already, arriving without anyone going anywhere. There is a contradiction in this. Someone who truly wanted to be left alone would not be hurt by silence. The hurt shows that beneath the wish for the partner to go lies a need to be answered, to be proven worth answering.
Nothing is supplied about Penelope beyond a first name, and the poem needs nothing more. Its significance lies in its honesty and compression. It admits a thought many people would hide, the urge to test someone by imagining them gone, and it shows how self-defeating that urge is. It also refuses to tidy things up. The poem never decides whether the relationship was "the best," and it ends where the speaker's voice runs out.