Clothes, skin, a smile: Sarah's six lines are built from the things other people can see. Everything the speaker actually feels is kept underneath. Her title, "eyes can be deceiving", gives away the game. It echoes the familiar saying that looks can be deceiving, but it changes the subject. Here it is eyes, the watchers' eyes, that get things wrong. Nobody in the poem is lying exactly. The speaker simply shows a surface, and the surface is believed.
The poem is a run of three pairs, each a confession followed by a correction. "i am naked" is clearly not literal, since the next line has her fully dressed, so nakedness becomes a metaphor for feeling exposed and defenceless. What stands out is the verb in "my clothes coat my form". A coat is a layer applied over something, like paint or varnish, and "form" reduces the body to a mere outline. Clothes here don't protect her. They hide her. In the second pair, "i am in pain. / but my skin stays intact", the word "intact" sounds like the language of an inspection: nothing broken, nothing to see. It measures damage the way a bystander would, and a bystander finds none.
Read as a whole, the pairs move inward and then snap back out. The speaker starts with clothes, passes to skin, and arrives at the mind: "my mind is at war". That is the deepest layer, and it gets the poem's biggest metaphor. A war is loud, large and violent, and the poem sets it against the smallest possible gesture, "but i smile". The smile is the third covering after clothes and skin, and the only one she controls. It is also the only one that is an action, something she does for an audience. Nothing in the poem mentions eyes, and that is worth noticing. The smile belongs to the mouth. Judging by the imagery, the one place where the truth might leak out is exactly the thing the poem leaves out.
The sound and shape of the lines reinforce this. There is no end rhyme, but the poem repeats itself. "but" opens three lines in a row, and "my" recurs in "my clothes", "my form", "my skin" and "my mind", as if she were taking inventory of what belongs to her. Alliteration tightens the second line ("clothes coat"), and the long "o" in "form" and "war" echoes faintly across the poem, linking the body's outline to the battle inside. The line lengths follow a pattern that is then broken. Counting syllables, the lines run four, six, four, six, then five and three. The expected rhythm of "i am… but my…" collapses in the last pair, which starts with "my mind" instead of "i am" and ends on the shortest line of all. The poem shrinks at exactly the moment it should swell, as though the smile were a door closing.
Punctuation plays its part too. The first two confessions end in full stops, flat and settled, like facts she has accepted. The third, "my mind is at war", has no full stop, and the poem as a whole has no final one. The war is unfinished, and the poem simply stops on a smile. Everything is also in lowercase, even "i". It might read as casual, like a note typed quickly, or as a quiet shrinking of the self. Either way, it matches the voice of someone who doesn't want to make a fuss.
The "but" in each pair is more subtle than it first looks. Grammatically it promises a contrast, but the speaker doesn't cancel the first half. She is naked and clothed, in pain and unmarked, at war and smiling, all at the same time. The word marks the hinge between inside and outside, a place where the two never meet.
Part of the poem's significance is how little it needs. It is signed only "sarah", with no date or context given, and none is required, because the experience it describes is easy to recognise. Many readers will know what it is to answer "fine" while feeling otherwise, or to be judged only by what shows. The poem doesn't explain or plead. It states its contradictions plainly and trusts the reader to notice what the speaker's smile is hiding.