Four short lines, no scenery, no metaphor, no one else in the room. A speaker says that they should kill themselves, says it every day, and counts each day as another failure. The central idea is not a single moment of crisis but repetition. The thought has become a habit, and the habit has become the yardstick by which the speaker measures themselves. The poem is less interested in the dramatic edge of despair than in its grind.
Nothing reliable can be said about who wrote it. The name above the poem reads like a username rather than a conventional author's name, and the poem has to stand on its own words. Even its title is a puzzle: «du verschwendest deine zeit 55» is German for "you are wasting your time," followed by a number the poem never explains. The title speaks in a different language from the poem and addresses a "du," a "you." Who that is, the text doesn't say. It could be an inner voice dismissing the speaker, or a reply to the thought itself, or a line aimed at the reader. The number might be a count, which would suit the poem's tallying, but that is only a guess. What matters is that the poem opens with a put-down before the speaker has said a word.
The construction is bare. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the line lengths do the work. The first line is short and flat: "i should kill myself." The second stretches out into the rhythm of ordinary speech: "thats what i say every day." Then the poem shrinks again to "and every day," which echoes the end of the previous line almost like a stutter. The final line, "is another failure," falls away on the soft ending of "failure." Because "and every day" is cut off from what follows, the reader pauses on the repetition before the verdict arrives. There is no full stop at the end either, so the poem stops without closing, much like the days it describes.
The wording is just as telling. Look at "should." The speaker doesn't say "want" or "will." "Should" is the language of duty and self-judgment, the word we use for homework we haven't done. Paired with "failure," it gives the poem a vocabulary of marks and performance, as if even the worst thought were a task to be graded. "Another" adds accumulation: each day is not a fresh start but one more entry in a ledger. And "say" matters, because the speaker reports saying the sentence, not acting on it. The poem leaves open what exactly fails. The days might be failures, or the speaker, or the endless saying itself. That ambiguity is part of its unease, since the text refuses to explain itself.
Small details of form add to this. The poem is entirely in lowercase, so the "i" never gets its capital, and "thats" has lost its apostrophe. These could simply be the habits of fast, informal writing, but the effect is of a self made small and a voice with no energy left for polish. There are no quotation marks around the first line either, so the line between the thought and the report of the thought blurs. The sentence is so familiar to the speaker that it no longer needs marking off.
The poem's significance lies in what it refuses to do. It offers no striking image, no comfort and no consoling turn in the last line. That plainness is deliberate in effect, whatever the intention behind it. By describing the thought in the same flat tone as a daily routine, the poem shows how something frightening can become ordinary to the person living with it. It also shows how quietly self-criticism can sit inside such a thought. For students, it is a useful example of how much meaning can fit into very little: line length, repetition and one loaded word like "should" can carry an entire state of mind.
It is also worth saying plainly that a poem like this deserves care. Talking about it in class is fine, and so is noticing that it hits close to home. If any of these thoughts feel familiar to you, tell a teacher, a parent, a friend or another adult you trust. You don't have to carry them alone.