The speaker of "Why Not Me?" is not a person at all. It takes a few lines to realise this. "She delicately slips me on, / Over her graceful feet" is the first clue, and "her lively feet inside me" removes the doubt. The speaker is a dancer's shoe, and the poem is its confession of love. Even the "horrible, huge white bag, / Filled with her clothes" turns out to be a kit bag, the place where the shoe is shut away when the dancing stops. The poet withholds the speaker's identity just long enough for the reader to enjoy working it out.
The shoe's love is built from closeness, and the poem keeps returning to the body. It wants her "touch" and wants "to breathe in her proximity." That second phrase is oddly formal, almost scientific, as though the shoe cannot find an ordinary word for how much it needs her. Its world is small and sensory. All it hears is "magical music," which suggests sound muffled and filtered through the dancer's movement, and all it knows is the pressure of her feet. Being worn is the only way it can be loved, and that gives the poem a gentle ache.
The refrain "Hour by hour, / Day by day" does most of the structural work. The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, just short, plain, end-stopped lines, but the refrain gives it a pulse like a rehearsal routine. What makes it clever is that the same words change their meaning as they recur. At first they describe happy devotion, the endless practice of dancing together. After the shoe imagines the white bag, they sound like a sentence being served. After "I hate that guy," they become jealousy. After "I wish I could / But I can't," they become helplessness. The repetition never alters, but the feeling around it keeps sliding.
That slide is the poem's real subject. The early lines are tender, with "delicately" and "tenderly" setting a soft tone. Then the shoe says, "She shouldn't go to school, / She should live with me." The wish sounds innocent, even childlike, and it suggests the dancer is young, though that is only an inference from the word "school." But it is also possessive. The shoe wants to rearrange her whole life around itself. By the end, love has hardened into entitlement: "He doesn't love her like I do, / I'm the one she should be with." Jealousy has taken the shoe over completely.
The rival, "that guy," is the dance partner, and the poem makes the unfairness vivid. He can "lift her, / Hold her, / Touch her more than I do," and when she falls, "She whimpers / And he helps her up." The shoe has the most constant contact of anyone, because it is on her feet for hours, yet it is the one who cannot act. The line break before "But I can't" carries the whole tragedy of an object that feels everything and can do nothing. There is some dark comedy here too. The shoe's complaint that he touches her "more than I do" is not strictly true, which shows how far its jealousy has distorted its judgment.
"Millions of people" is an obvious exaggeration, but it fits a speaker who sees performances as a grand public declaration of its bond with her. Being "seen with her" is the shoe's version of a couple being seen together.
The poem matters because of the choice of speaker. A human narrator describing unrequited love and jealousy would be familiar. Giving the voice to an object turns familiar emotions slightly strange, and so more noticeable. We feel sympathy for the shoe's devotion and are also uneasy about its possessiveness, and the poem never settles which response is right. The question mark in the title, "Why Not Me?", is also unanswerable. The shoe is silent, replaceable and unable to be loved back, and the poem ends on its question without any reply. Anyone who has felt overlooked while doing all the quiet work of supporting someone else will recognise the feeling.