"You noticed" is the phrase that drives this poem, and it works like a charge being read out in court. Four times the speaker says it, and each time another detail is added to the file: the grades, the anger, the nightly sound of the scales, the constant mint gum, the quiet, the hair. The central idea is that the person addressed cannot claim ignorance. By the end the reader has been given the evidence, and the excuse "I didn't realise" collapses under it.
The poem never names what is wrong with the boy, and that restraint matters. Taken together, though, the imagery points one way. Scales that "sound" every night, mint gum that is always in his mouth, hair falling out and a growing silence suggest, judging by these details, an eating disorder, perhaps with the gum as a way of hiding something on his breath. That is an inference, since the poem leaves it unsaid. The gap is part of the point. Each sign alone could be explained away as a teenage phase, and the poem's argument is that someone who was paying attention would have seen them add up.
The most painful line is the third: "Then you took away everything he loves." It is the only moment when the addressee acts, and the action is punishment. Falling grades and anger are treated as bad behaviour rather than as symptoms. The next line, "But you didn't do anything," sounds like a contradiction, since they did do something. The poem's logic is that punishing him doesn't count. The word "everything" is exaggerated, but it shows how it looks from his side: whatever might have steadied him was removed, and nothing was offered in its place. The addressee, probably a parent or other adult in his life (the text only suggests this), responds to the surface and misses what lies under it.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation, and the lines are short and plain, closer to a list than to song. That flatness makes the poem sound like an accusation made through clenched teeth. The repeated sentence openings give it a steady, accumulating rhythm, and the second stanza breaks it. After "You noticed how quiet he has been / And his hair falling out" the statements give way to questions: "Why didn't you say anything? / Why didn't you ask him if he is okay?" Both questions are simple, almost childlike, and that is what makes them hard to answer. Asking "Are you okay?" takes no expertise, only the willingness to ask.
Then comes the poem's sharpest moment. The excuse appears in quotation marks, "I didn't realise," in someone else's voice, and the speaker answers with a single word: "Bullshit." It is the only coarse word in the poem and it gets a line to itself. The restrained, listing voice drops, and anger shows through. The word is also logically justified, because everything the poem has listed shows the addressee did realise.
The ending is deliberately flat. "But it's too late / And now he's gone." The poem doesn't say whether "gone" means death, running away or something else, and the plain euphemism leaves the loss without any explanation. There is no consolation and no image to soften it. The last line is short and final, and it follows the long chain of "you noticed" like a door closing.
The text comes with a username and a German line, «du verschwendest deine zeit 24» ("you are wasting your time"). I can't say how it relates to the poem, but "wasting time" does echo the theme of a moment that has already passed.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it does not mourn the boy in the usual way. It puts the reader in the position of the accused and makes them answer. For a school audience that is useful, because the poem teaches a practical kind of attention: changes in mood, habits and appearance are worth noticing, but the poem insists that noticing is only the first step and asking is the second.