"Stop lying to yourself" is a harsh way to begin a poem, and smolgeir does it twice. The title, "Lies", points at the target: not lies told by other people, but the small private ones, like "I'm fine" or "it'll pass". The poem is a piece of tough love. A voice, possibly one person talking to their own reflection, refuses to let the listener hide, and its central idea is that denial is not a way of coping but a trap, and that the only way out is to admit the problem and ask for help.
The poem has two halves. The first six lines are diagnosis: "You're not alright" is as flat and unadorned as a statement can be. The second half is prescription, starting with the repeated command and its new ending, "And go get some help." The refrain returns with a direction attached, as if the speaker has finished describing the problem and moved on to what to do about it. The repetition also works like a thought stuck on a loop, which suits a poem about a mind that won't switch off.
The imagery is sparse, but it is used well. The tunnel is a twist on the familiar phrase about light at the end of it. Here the speaker says "At the end of the tunnel / Shine no light," and the grammar is clipped and strange, almost as if the light has been switched off by the sentence itself. Hope is not just missing but cancelled. The night comes next, and the poem admits things "get even worse in the middle of the night / When your brain gives no remorse." Remorse normally means regret for a wrong, so the word is stretched here. Judging by the context, it seems to mean something like mercy or relief: the brain shows none, and keeps pressing on whatever hurts. The most vivid image is "Your head will end up devouring itself." Eating oneself is a grotesque picture of rumination, a mind with nothing else to feed on. It also echoes the earlier word "yourself", and the sound of "itself" lands like a verdict on the first line.
The sound of the poem supports this. There are no stanza breaks and no punctuation, so the lines tumble on without a pause, the way thoughts do when you can't sleep. Most lines are short, four to six syllables, which makes them feel like blunt orders. Line five breaks the pattern: "It gets even worse in the middle of the night" runs to about twelve syllables, and the lengthening of the line mimics the stretching of a sleepless hour. The rhymes are simple and firm. "Alright", "light" and "night" chime across the first half, and the short vowel sound makes the words feel hard and final. Then "yourself", "help" and "itself" form a looser, slant-rhymed group, with the repeated "self" sound circling back like the trapped thinking it describes. The poem's only full rhyme in the closing lines is "built" and "guilt", and it carries the whole final idea: the prison is something you made, and it is made of guilt.
Those last three lines move faster than anything before them. "You must get out" is the shortest, most urgent line, and it is followed by the repeated "Escape", which gives the ending the feel of a chant. The shift from "a prison you built" to "this guilt" is subtle. "You built" points back to the past and to responsibility, while "this" points at something present and almost within reach. The idea of a self-built prison cuts two ways. It is a little accusing, because you made it, but it is also hopeful, because anything you built is something you can walk out of. The poem ends on the word "guilt" rather than on freedom, so the exit is still only an instruction, not an achievement.
The poem's significance lies partly in what it chooses not to do. It avoids ornament and metaphor-heavy comfort, and it doesn't pretend that things will naturally improve. Its most practical line, "go get some help", is also the plainest, and it sits in the middle of the poem rather than being tucked away as a gentle afterthought. For young readers it models a blunt but caring kind of honesty: the voice is harsh toward the lie, not toward the person, and everything it says is aimed at getting someone to look up from the tunnel and reach out.