Colour does nearly all the talking in taelintt's "Feels." The speaker never says "I love him" outright. Instead she tells us what shade he is. His pen, his voice and his eyes are all dark blue, and the poem comes close to synesthesia when she calls blue "the color that i saw when / i heard his voice." It is a clever way to describe a crush, because it turns a shapeless feeling into something you can see.
The first half is devotion, and it is built on the night sky. Lying in a backyard of "emerald grass," she is "tracing the constellations with my pupils," a precise image that makes her eyes into pencils joining the dots between stars. The colours then double as moods. He makes her "yellow with happiness / and blue at the same time," which fits the English habit of calling sadness blue. "He make me green" is less clear. Given the poem's later jealousy of another girl, it may hint at envy, though that is an inference. The phrase "at the same time" returns when his eyes are "so dark and bright at the same time," so both he and her feeling for him are made of opposites. His smile is "as bright as the moon," and the moon belongs to the same night sky as everything else she loves about him.
The poem turns on the line "he loves a girl that is golden." The palette changes from cool blues to amber, crimson, black and lilac. The golden girl is not simply glowing. She has "crimson tears pouring out of her eyes" and a heart "overgrown with beautiful black flowers" and "filled with lilac skies." That is a striking portrait, with beauty and damage growing together like a neglected garden. Whether the speaker admires this girl, resents her or wants to become her stays open. What follows suggests the last. "Although i was brunette from the start / i then had a golden soul." The word "then" marks a change. Brunette is what she was born as, and gold is what she takes on.
In the final lines the poem shifts to "you," and the word "golden" saturates everything. There is "golden air" and "golden lungs," and by the end she is "a good little golden girl." It is not entirely clear who "you" is. It could be the boy or the golden girl, and the poem never says. Either way, the idea of not wanting to "breathe the same golden air" makes distance feel physical, as if even sharing a breath were too close. The resolve collapses fast: "it only took a second / to forget." The closing line drops from the grand language of constellations to the small, almost patronising phrase "good little." It sounds like praise given to a child or a pet. It could be self-mockery or obedience, or sincere pride, and the poem lets all three stand. After so much repetition, gold stops sounding like treasure and starts to sound like a label she has agreed to wear. Blue, his colour and the colour of the poem's opening, is gone from the last section entirely.
The form supports this. There are no stanza breaks, no rhyme scheme and almost no capital letters, so the poem reads like a diary entry typed in one go. The opening fragments, "blue. / azure skies.", are slow and hushed, and the lines lengthen as feeling spills over. The grammar is casual ("he make me," "has heart," "in backyard"). Whether by design or haste, this gives the voice an unpolished honesty that suits a confession.
The title adds to this. "Feels" is the slang word for strong emotion, and it understates a poem so full of colour. What makes the poem worth reading is how it shows a crush reshaping a person's sense of herself. It begins with a speaker looking up at a boy as vast as the sky and ends with her reduced to a single adjective, one she may have chosen, or may only believe she was meant to be.