Proverbs usually get the last word. In Sam M's «Bullshit», one is dragged into the dock and cross-examined. The saying is "out of sight out of mind", the standard comfort offered after a breakup, and the poem asks whether it holds up in real life. The answer, saved for the final line, is that the proverb may be less a truth than a story we tell ourselves to get through the day.
The poem is built like a conversation rather than a performance. It is free verse, with no regular rhythm, no fixed line length and no steady rhyme scheme. The punctuation is loose in a way that sounds like speech: "But does it really work" and "But it doesn't work does it" arrive without question marks, as if muttered or delivered with a shrug. Questions drive almost every stage ("Do you see them anymore?", "So is the saying true?"), and the speaker never lectures, only keeps poking. The direct address pulls the reader in, and the command "Think about him or her" quietly proves the point. To obey it, you have to summon exactly the person the proverb says should be out of mind. The phrase "him or her" opens the experience to anyone, and the two short lines "They left you / Or you left them" balance like a see-saw. Whoever ended it, the aftermath is the same.
The poem's one concrete image is the phone, and it is well chosen. "Out of sight" is normally a figure of speech, but here it becomes literal: deleting contacts, clearing a camera roll. The longest line in the poem, "You tried to erase every trace of them off of your phone", is stretched by the sheer effort it describes, and "erase" and "trace" chime together as though the job were neat and complete. The next line undercuts it at once: "But it doesn't work does it." Then comes the trap. "There's always that one photo / That one favorite memory." The repeated "that one" makes the memory sound specific and nameable, and "favorite" is cruelly exact, because the happiest memory is the one that hurts most. There is also a faint echo, whether intended or not, between the proverb's "mind" and the later "find" in "in months time you'll find". The thing you thought you had buried turns up anyway.
The grammar of blame is subtle here. Finding the photo feels like an ambush, something that happens to you, yet the next line says "cause yourself pain all over again". The speaker hands responsibility back to the person who clicked. "All over again" gives the stanza its sense of a cycle, with the heartbreak waiting to be restarted by a single swipe.
Then the poem leaves a gap and delivers its final line, which is longer and sharper than anything before it. The title has been waiting for this moment. "Bullshit" is a blunt, unpoetic word, and the poem earns it by holding it back. The verb form is the clever part: "bullshitting yourself". The target shifts from the saying to the reader's own self-deception, and the final phrase, "thinking you'll get better", suggests that the hope of recovery itself might be the comforting lie. Still, the poem is careful. It opens that last line with "Or", so it ends as a question rather than a verdict, and it does not say healing is impossible, only that the easy cure is suspect.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses consolation. Its language is everyday and its only real image is a phone, which limits it but also makes it honest. It argues by recognition rather than evidence, and anyone who has scrolled past an old photo will nod before they can disagree. It is short, rough and unresolved, but it captures the moment when a tidy saying runs into a camera roll and loses.