"Hey / Hey you / You" is less an opening than someone trying to catch a person's attention before it slips away. The speaker narrows the address in three steps, from a greeting to a person to a single pronoun, and then demands eye contact: "Look me in the eyes." The poem is an urgent plea to someone who hurts themselves with "a knife to your wrist." The speaker asks for a promise that this person will never "regret" them, and will never count them among the failures that fuel the cutting. The central idea is that the self-harmer's private tally of inadequacy, "good enough / fast enough / strong enough," is wrong, and that love is the evidence against it.
The poem's most striking device is how it handles that triplet. In the first half, the three phrases are accusations the other person levels at themselves: "You weren't good enough / Or fast enough / Or strong enough." Later the speaker hands the same words back as promises: "I promise it was good enough / I promise you were strong enough / I promise you were fast enough." The vocabulary stays the same while the verdict flips, as if the speaker is quietly correcting someone else's arithmetic. The repeated "Another" works in a similar way. "Another maybe / Another if only / Another if I had been better" stacks up like entries in a list, and the poem later fixes on "just another regret / Buried under just another scar." The word "just" is the cruel one here, since it reduces a person to one more item in a pile.
The imagery follows two paths. One is erosion: "sands of time," "lines drawn in the sand," "rusts," "bloody dust." Scars are pictured as marks that pile up and bury earlier ones, so that a person risks being buried under them. The other path is flight. The beloved "cradled me in the sky," and when the speaker "hit the ground so hard every part of me shattered into dust," they "tossed me back into the sky so even then I could fly." Dust appears twice, and the contrast matters. The first dust is where forgotten people end up, while the second is the speaker's own broken self, which is thrown upward and not left to settle. The speaker is claiming that the person they are pleading with has already proved, in action, that they are a rescuer and not a failure.
The sound of the poem reinforces this. It is free verse with no steady meter, and the lines swing between short gasps ("Hey," "You") and long breathless ones, like the line about the "churchbells." Rhyme appears in bursts, often when memory takes over: "halt" and "hold me," then "scold me" and "told me," followed by "rust" and "dust," and "sky" and "fly." These clusters make the tender memories feel closer and more musical than the angry present. The vow "strong as words under churchbells" also casts the promise as a solemn oath. Where one might swear on a holy book, the speaker asks for an oath "on every one of those cuts," turning the scars into the very thing that must witness the promise.
The poem is not entirely tidy, which makes it more honest. The line "every new scar is the only thing to cancel out how much I love you" is slippery. Read literally, it says scars are the one thing that can cancel love, which seems to contradict the poem's argument. It may be meant as the reverse, or it may be a moment where the speaker's fear gets ahead of their syntax. The speaker's own need also surfaces. The final request, that "I don't become just another regret," makes the plea partly about the speaker, and the closing "Aren't we?" turns a string of confident commands into an uncertain question. After all the vows, the speaker still wants to be reassured.
This is why the poem matters. Many poems on self-harm speak from the inside, but this one speaks from beside the person, in the voice of someone who loves them and is frightened. It doesn't pretend that love is a cure, but it insists on a counterweight: one person's pain should not erase the evidence of what they have given. Readers affected by the subject should know that talking to a trusted adult is a good next step.