Everything in rumsoup's poem happens in the time it takes someone to turn around. A woman swings away, her damp hair catches the speaker's cheek, she glances back with an apologetic half-smile, and that is the entire event. The poem is about how a tiny accident can feel enormous. Nothing is said about who these two people are, and I'll leave that blank rather than guess. The text gives us only a moment, and the speaker treats it as a revelation.
The title, «Magic, isn't it?», sets this up. The guillemets mark it as speech, but it is unclear whose. It could be something she says, or something the speaker mutters to himself. The poem closes by repeating the question with a doubled question mark and no quotation marks: "Magic, isn't it??" By then the words have clearly become his, and the second question mark reads like a breathless nudge to the reader. He is no longer asking a question so much as insisting on an answer.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, but its shape is deliberate. The stanzas run two, four, three, three, two and one lines. They swell as the speaker's senses flood in, with the long fourth-line sentence about "the fragrance and the wetness" at the peak. Then they shrink to the lone closing line, as though the speaker has run out of words. The line breaks also act out the action. "Her lips curve / in an apology" breaks just where the lips would bend, and "ruffling her / front locks" hangs on the line-end like a strand of hair mid-flick.
The sound work is simple but effective. "Luscious locks" is a soft, liquid alliteration, and then comes "slap," a hard, sudden word that interrupts it. That one verb tells us the contact was abrupt and physical, yet the speaker complains about nothing. Two long adverbs mirror each other across the poem: she turns "hurriedly," while he stares "uninterruptedly." Both are stretched out by their -ly endings, and together they set up the contrast at the poem's heart. She moves on quickly with no idea of her effect, while he is stuck in place.
The imagery is almost entirely sensory and close-up: scent, wetness, touch on the cheek. "The wet shower" is a slightly odd phrase, since a shower is wet by definition, and the repetition of "wetness… wet" makes the word cling to the lines the way the water clings to the skin. Judging by this detail, her hair has just been washed. The speaker never describes her whole body or even her whole face at first, only locks, lips, and later "the face full / of enthusiasm." The woman is seen in fragments, as someone glimpsed rather than studied, and this makes the poem feel like an honest report of a flustered mind.
That fluster shows up in the language itself. The phrase "drive my demons high" is a strange one, and it hints at urges the speaker would rather not name. Then the grammar wobbles. "I stare the face full" drops the expected "at," and "which just made me go haywire" slides into casual slang. These are not polished lines, and that suits a speaker who has lost his composure. The register jumps again in the last stanza, where the "demons" are replaced by innocence: "I am awestruck like a kid / on seeing a miracle." The poem moves from something almost guilty to something childlike. The simile suggests the feeling is less about conquest than about wonder, the kind a child feels when a magician's coin appears from nowhere.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it finds the miraculous in an accident. Nothing supernatural happens, only a mildly embarrassing collision and an apology. Yet the speaker's reaction suggests that attention is what makes a moment magical. The same hair-flick could pass unnoticed on another day. The poem's honesty about this is its strength. It doesn't claim the woman did anything special, only that he was ready to be astonished.
It is also fair to notice what the poem leaves out. We never hear her side, so the "magic" belongs entirely to the speaker's eyes. The poem works as a portrait of a mind rather than of a person, and for a few short lines that mind is the most interesting thing in the room.