Two lines, one rhyme, and a whole small drama about wanting to be looked at. "Lights," signed Sherlock and dated August 12th, 2015, puts its speaker on a stage, blinded by the glare, and lets them decide what the dark audience must be thinking. Nothing is known here beyond what the page gives us, so the poem has to be read on its own evidence. Judging by the imagery, the speaker is a performer. The "you" is someone in the crowd, or at least someone the speaker hopes is there.
The central idea is a kind of honest self-deception. The speaker doesn't claim to know that "you" was watching with longing. They admit the opposite: "it's nearly impossible to see." The stage lights create a strange imbalance. The person on stage is the most visible in the room and the least able to see anyone else. The lights that expose the speaker also hide the audience. Into that blank, the speaker pours a wish.
The grammar of the second line shows this. "But I'm still going to pretend" is a decision, not a daydream. "Still" suggests the speaker has already weighed the facts and is choosing the fantasy anyway. Then comes "you really were staring." The word "really" is doing odd work, because you only need to pretend that something is real when it isn't. And "were" is the past tense of a hypothetical, the mood of things that probably didn't happen. The speaker leans on the language of truth ("really") while using the grammar of doubt ("were"). That tension is the whole poem in miniature.
The construction is simple but deliberate. The two lines rhyme on "see" and "me," a neat couplet that mirrors the two people involved: what the speaker can't do, and what they wish were happening. The rhyme also shows how the poem's attention narrows. The first line ends on the speaker's failing sight, and the second ends on the speaker themselves. Even in a poem about someone else's gaze, the last word is "me."
The rhythm helps. The first line is fairly short and falls into a conversational, almost shrugging beat, and the colon at its end acts like a held breath. The second line is much longer and runs on, piling up syllables. It sounds like the fantasy getting out of hand, or like someone talking quickly to cover embarrassment. The blank space between the lines works like the dark between stage and seats: a gap that the speaker has to cross by imagination.
The key words are the most distinctive part of the writing. "Dreamingly" isn't the usual form, and "dreamily" would be the standard choice. The stretched word, paired with "longingly," gives the line a doubled "-ingly" sound that feels slightly breathless and over-sweet. The ampersand in "dreamingly & longingly" adds to this. It looks casual and hurried, like something typed or scribbled, so the romantic vocabulary comes across as heartfelt but a little self-conscious. The speaker seems aware that the picture is a bit theatrical, which suits someone standing on a stage. There is also a quiet comedy in the pairing of "staring" with the two soft adverbs. Staring is usually blunt, even rude, but here it has been softened into adoration.
Another detail is "nearly impossible." The speaker could have said "impossible" and made the fantasy a pure invention. "Nearly" leaves a crack of possibility open: perhaps the speaker really could have caught a glimpse. That small hedge keeps the poem tender rather than bitter, and it lets the reader wonder how much the speaker believes their own pretending.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it claims. Many love poems assert devotion or insist on a shared feeling. This one starts with an admission of ignorance and builds its emotion from there. The result feels truthful because it admits the limits of its own perspective. Almost everyone has wanted a person to be looking at them, and almost everyone has filled in the blanks in their favour. The poem names that habit without mocking it. It also suggests that wanting to be seen, whether on a stage or elsewhere, can matter more than the proof. The final image is not of a returned gaze but of the speaker standing in bright light, choosing to believe in one.