Almost every stanza of "Tell Me Ma" rests on the same impossible task: how do I say this to you? Susovan's speaker, a nineteen-year-old talking to his mother, never gets an answer. The poem's force comes from that question circling back, each time with a different obstacle in front of it.
The opening is startlingly blunt. "how do i kill myself / knowing that you almost died / giving birth to me." The question isn't about method but about debt. His life was bought at the risk of hers, and that fact is both a chain and a reason to live. When the thought returns near the end, one verb has changed: "how do i tell you that i want to kill myself." The problem is no longer the act but the sentence, the difficulty of saying it aloud. The poem moves from the unthinkable to the unspeakable, and his mother stands in the way both times.
The mother is never made a villain. Her objections are ordinary, even reasonable-sounding: "you're only ninteen," "you think i have enough friends," she doubts his ability to pass his exams. The poem lets us see how easily those assumptions can hide a person. The term "high-functioning depression" explains the whole problem in two words, since someone who still sits his exams and still has friends looks fine from outside. There is a flash of irony, too. His mother says psychology was her favourite subject, and he asks, with the poem's only edge of reproach, "then why is it that you fail to understand me?" It is a small, sharp moment, and he doesn't press it.
The form suits this. There is no regular rhythm and almost no rhyme. The lines are lowercase and conversational, and the line breaks follow the hesitations of someone working up to speech. Even the pronoun "i" is never capitalised, which gives the speaker a deflated, unassuming presence. The refrain "how do i tell you" and its variant "how do i talk to you" builds like a series of doors tried and found locked. The longer lines, such as the one listing "breakdowns in the school washroom," the nightmares and the "demons that suffocate me every day," spill past the neat questions, as though the pain has outgrown the framing.
The imagery is bodily and plain: a heart that "bleed[s]," "wounds that never healed," demons that "suffocate." The washroom detail stands out because it is so ordinary. It suggests a pain that surfaces between lessons, behind a closed cubicle door, in a building full of people who don't notice. Then comes a paradox: "i can never show you the poetry i have created / out of the wounds." Yet we are reading that poetry now. The poem is the telling he can't do at home, handed to a stranger instead. Since his mother "doesn't understand poetry," the poem's plain, speech-like language might be read as a kind of translation, though that is an inference from the text.
The pivot is a single word on its own line: "but." What follows swaps questions for statements. "you're still the most beautiful woman," "you're still an amazing mother," "you're still the person i think of going to when i cry." Each "still" is paired with an "even if" that quietly records the hurt: even if you don't understand poetry, even if you think i'm too young, even if i can never justify these tears. Love and incomprehension are held in the same breath.
The ending gives the poem's only clear rhyme: "makes me stay" and "wake up the next day." The chime feels like resolution, but the sense refuses it. Staying is not the same as wanting to live, and the poem doesn't pretend otherwise. His mother keeps him here, and the final line admits how fragile that is.
That honesty is what makes the poem matter. It doesn't offer a cure or blame anyone. It shows how a young person can be loved and still unseen, and how silence can feel safer than the truth. For any reader who recognises their own thoughts in these lines, the poem points to its own lesson: the unsaid is where the danger lies, and the speaker's greatest need is to be heard.