Everybody has heard that the eyes are the window to the soul, and Sam Glaspy opens by quoting that saying only to turn against it. The first two lines work like a hinge: "They say" belongs to the crowd, and "But I" belongs to the speaker. The poem then argues, quietly and with some humour, that knowing a person has very little to do with staring at them. The title, "5/8/2020- Eyes", carries a date, which gives the piece the feel of a diary entry, something set down in the moment rather than polished for show.
The form is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat, and it reads like speech. The most striking passage is the stack of single-word lines: "Eye contact isn't / Respect, / Easy, / Or painless." Breaking the sentence apart makes the reader slow down at each word. "Respect" is the surprising one. Many people are taught that looking someone in the eye is simply polite, so the speaker is also pushing against a social rule. "Painless" then admits that the discomfort is real. After these short, halting lines, the poem opens into long, unbroken ones: "I only manage it with people I feel safest with." The verb "manage" tells us that eye contact takes effort, and "safest" suggests that the speaker measures closeness in terms of safety.
The longest line is the most exposed: "I don't want people to be able to see me if I don't even like who I see in the mirror." The mirror turns the poem inward. Judging by this line, the fear is partly about self-image, since being looked at feels like being found out. The poem never explains this further, and that restraint is effective. The next line, "I can still pay attention without directly looking at someone," is flat and practical, as if the speaker had said it many times to defend themselves. Then comes the pivot: "There are other ways to see into souls."
The second part is the poem's proof. Its list begins with weighty things, "art, / Music, / Books," and "people closest to them," then drifts into the everyday: how someone sleeps, their favourite animal, "a morning or night person," "chocolate or vanilla." The movement from big to small is deliberate. The speaker claims that character shows up in trivial preferences, and the list demonstrates it. Chocolate or vanilla sounds silly, yet people tend to answer it with surprising enthusiasm and a little story. These questions invite someone to talk about themselves, while a stare only demands that they be looked at.
The poem's best move is its ending. "See?" is a teacher's word, a small triumph, and "your" is the first time the speaker addresses the reader directly. Reading the list, you have probably answered some of the questions in your head, so the poem has just done what it said it could do. The final line is also where the humour lands: "That dug a lot deeper into your soul than me staring into your / Over glorified colored face orbs." The sentence breaks off at "your," and the next line swerves into a joke. "Orbs" sounds clinical and slightly alien, and "glorified" mocks the cliché the poem began with. Nobody could write "windows to the soul" in the same tone after that. The joke also works as protection, since a speaker who has just admitted a painful insecurity ends on a laugh that keeps control of the mood.
The poem matters because it takes a common but rarely discussed difficulty and presents it with dignity. It does not apologise for avoiding eye contact, and it does not ask for pity. It says that attention and intimacy can take other forms, and it offers evidence in the plainest language it can find. A reader who finds eye contact easy may learn that someone who looks away is not necessarily rude or hiding anything. A reader who finds it hard may be glad to see their experience described so directly. The poem is short and unadorned, but it makes a clear case that the details we choose to share, like our favourite music or ice cream flavour, can show a lot about who we are.