Nine short lines, three small arguments, and not one of them gets finished. That is the trick of "if's and why's" by Vampire Gal. Each stanza sets a tidy explanation beside an untidy human fact and leaves the two standing there, refusing to fit together.
The subject is the gap between explaining a feeling and having one. Every "if" clause offers a deflating definition: love is "a state of mind", fear is "just adrenaline", the speaker is "just a mass of cells". Every "why" clause answers with something the definition can't swallow. If love lives only in the mind, why does it "hurt your heart"? The stanza quietly swaps the thinking organ for the feeling one, and the abstract for the physical. A state of mind shouldn't ache in the chest, yet love does. The poem's central suspicion is that "just", which appears in both the second and third stanzas, is the most dishonest word in any explanation. A chemical description of fear may be accurate, but "just" claims it is complete.
The construction is a piece of borrowed logic. "If... why" is the grammar of the science classroom and the courtroom, where a premise is supposed to lead to a conclusion. Here the form is turned against itself, because the conclusion never arrives. The "if" lines are longer, seven or eight syllables, and the "why" lines shorter, six or seven. Each stanza begins with a confident stretch and ends on a shorter, almost breathless line. Several lines fall into near-iambic beats, and "why does it hurt your heart" has three even stresses. The h-sounds in "hurt" and "heart" bump together, so the line stings as it is read. There is no end rhyme anywhere, which suits a poem where nothing clicks shut.
Punctuation tells its own story. Only the first question gets a question mark. The second and third drop it, and the poem finishes without a full stop. The questions seem to shift from rhetorical flourish to something more open and unsettled. The lowercase "i" and the apostrophes in the title ("if's and why's") give the voice a conversational, unassuming tone, like someone thinking aloud rather than lecturing.
The pronouns move in a quiet arc. The first stanza speaks of "your heart", addressing a reader. The second widens to "we sense trouble". The third narrows to "i", alone, and to the smallest scale of all, cells. The "if" clauses shrink in the same way, from mind to chemical to cell, each step reducing the person further. The "why" clauses push back with "heart", "trouble" and finally "emotions", named plainly. In "why do we sense trouble", the verb "sense" does double duty. Adrenaline explains what the body does once danger is noticed, but the poem seems to ask what does the noticing in the first place. That is a reading rather than a stated claim, but it fits the poem's habit of questioning the explanation rather than denying it. The last line turns on "need". It doesn't ask why I have emotions but why I need them, as if feelings were a requirement and not a decoration. A mass of cells, strictly speaking, needs nothing of the sort.
All we are given about the writer is the name "Vampire Gal", and I won't guess at what stands behind it. As a persona, though, the name adds an edge. A vampire is a body that is supposed to run on mechanism, and in stories it is defined by longing and appetite anyway. Read that way, the final question sounds like a creature that ought to be pure biology asking why it can't stop feeling. That is an inference from the name and the text, not a claim about intent.
The poem matters because it is small and honest. It doesn't sneer at science or gush about the heart. It lets both claims stand and shows that neither quite closes the case. Conditional sentences usually end in certainty, and these end in a question, so the reader is left to finish them.