Three lines, one sentence, and a whole history packed into the gap between "erase" and "weakness." Nothing accompanies the poem, neither a date nor a story about who "you" might be, and that silence is part of its force. The reader gets only the outcome: after many years, the speaker still carries someone they have tried to be rid of.
The central idea is a quiet reversal of what we expect from time. We are told that time heals and that feelings fade if we wait long enough. Here the waiting has done the opposite. The inability to forget has not shrunk into something harmless. It "has become" a weakness, as if the years slowly converted a memory into a flaw of character. The present perfect matters, because it implies a process that crept up on the speaker instead of a sudden collapse.
The sentence is built in a telling way. Its grammatical subject is neither "I" nor "you" but an inability: "Not being able to erase you." The speaker vanishes into a negative phrase, a state of failing, and the very first word is "Not." The other person sits at the end of line one, while the speaker's effort sits at the start. Then "Now" opens the third line, a hinge between the long past of line two and the present admission. It makes the confession feel like a moment of recognition, the speaker stopping to take stock.
"Erase" is the poem's one real image, and a good one. We erase pencil, chalk, a message on a board, things that were written. The verb quietly pictures the other person as something inscribed on the speaker, and the speaker as someone who has reached for the eraser again and again. "Not being able" suggests attempts, not passivity: the effort is implied and only the failure is stated. Erasing is also a tidy, almost clerical act, which makes the failure sadder. The speaker wanted to remove the person without violence, and even that modest wish has gone unmet.
The middle line bends standard English: "this many years" instead of "these many years" or "so many years." The effect is worth noticing. "This" turns the years into one lump, a single block of time instead of a countable series, and the phrase has a spoken, slightly worn feel, like something said aloud to oneself. "Throughout" is a long word for so short a line. It stretches, so the line itself seems to last.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines run to roughly nine, six and seven syllables, longest first and then contracting, like a breath let out. The poem ends on "weakness," whose last syllable falls away unstressed, so instead of a firm click the poem trails off. Soft s-sounds drift through "erase," "this," "years," "has" and "weakness," giving the whole thing a hushed, almost whispered texture. Beneath them runs a low hum of n's in "Not," "Now," "become" and "many."
"Weakness" is the key word, and it is a surprising choice. The speaker could have said love, grief, pain or longing. "Weakness" is harsher and more self-judging, but it also has a second meaning, as in having a weakness for someone, a helpless fondness. The word holds shame and tenderness at once, and the poem declines to choose between them. It also refuses to dress the feeling up.
What makes the poem worth reading is this restraint. It does not explain, accuse or beg. The asterisks standing in for a title suggest a fragment, a thought picked up mid-stream, as if this admission is one the speaker has made privately many times before. In three lines it conveys long duration and quiet defeat. The name tideofmoon, perhaps by coincidence, suits it well: a pull that keeps returning, however often it is pushed back.