The fear in these few lines isn't of being disliked. It's of being found out. The speaker imagines that people currently see only "the twinkling of the stars" in their eyes, a charm or brightness that draws others in, and dreads the day those people "inevitably notice the poisonous gas surrounding them." The central idea is that admiration built on a partial view feels like a loan that will one day be called in. What makes the poem unsettling is that the speaker doesn't expect anger or a dramatic rejection. They expect something quieter and colder: that people will "choose to see nothing at all."
The title, «twinkling poisonous stars», fuses two images the poem itself keeps apart. In the body of the text, the stars sit in the speaker's eyes while the gas hangs around everyone else. The title lets "poisonous" slide straight onto the stars, as if the sparkle and the poison were one substance. There is a quiet logic to this. Real stars are enormous balls of burning gas, and their twinkling is caused by the air their light passes through on its way to us. The poem never says this, but the reading is available: beauty and toxicity may be made of the same stuff, and the sparkle may be partly an effect of distance. The pronoun in "surrounding them" is ambiguous too. It could mean the people, who are caught in the speaker's toxicity, or the stars themselves, whose glitter is wrapped in something harmful. The speaker's self-image is bleak either way.
The form is plain. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines read like a message typed out in one go. Its force comes from proportion. The first sentence is long and sprawling, stacking phrases on phrases: "people that saw nothing but the twinkling of the stars in my eyes." It also stumbles. "People that saw… to inevitably notice" doesn't resolve grammatically, and the sentence seems to trip over its own anxiety. That may be a slip of drafting, but the effect is of a thought running ahead of its syntax, which suits a fear. The word "inevitably" gives the speaker away, too. They aren't asking whether the truth will come out, only when.
Then the poem stops short. "And then?" is the shortest unit in the poem, a held breath, and it sets up the third part, which answers in a flat, nearly monosyllabic line: "They'll choose to see nothing at all." The repetition of "nothing" does the real work. At first, "saw nothing but" describes innocent partial vision, where the stars fill the view. By the end, "see nothing at all" describes deliberate blindness. Perception moves from something that happens to people to something they decide, and the verb shifts from "saw" to "choose." The imagined cruelty is not shouting or cutting off contact. It is being looked past. The speaker fears erasure more than rejection.
The poem's sound supports this. The opening is full of soft, shimmering sounds, "twinkling" with its light *tw* and *l*, while "poisonous" and "gas" hiss with sibilants that echo "saw," "stars," and "surrounding." The beautiful and the harmful share a sonic texture, so the shift between them is hard to hear coming, much as the speaker feels it will be hard to see coming.
As for who wrote it, the name attached to the poem, "thatonekidsusannah," reads like a self-applied label for someone easily overlooked. That fits the poem's concerns, but it is only an impression from the text, and nothing here depends on facts about the writer's life. The lowercase title and the username-style signature give the piece the feel of a private note made public.
Its significance lies in how much it holds in so little space. It captures a common fear, that being liked depends on not being fully known, and it does so without self-defense. The speaker never argues that the gas isn't really poisonous. That unquestioned self-judgment is the saddest note in the poem. Still, the last line is double-edged. It blames other people's choice to look away, but the speaker's own forecast of that choice may be a way of bracing for it, or even of keeping others from the chance to prove otherwise.