Five short lines, no rhyme, and a title that is just three asterisks. Yet the poem signed "victor" builds a small trap for its reader. It opens with something so ordinary that nobody would look twice: "Every time you turn up the volume." Only when the list darkens do we realise that this innocent first line belongs to it, and we have to go back and read it again.
That second reading is the poem's main move. Its central idea is that acts which look like separate problems (loud music, self-harm, skipped meals, cigarettes, alcohol) are really one thing: "a way to drown out the pain." The poem does not treat these behaviours as its subject. They are symptoms, and the real subject arrives only in the final word, "pain," held back until everything else has been listed. Until then the poem is a catalogue, and the last line turns the catalogue into an explanation.
The construction is simple and very deliberate. "Every time you" begins four lines in a row, a repetition that works like a drumbeat or a loop. There is no regular metre or rhyme to soften it, and the lines are close in length, so the effect is of something that keeps coming round. The phrase "every time" also gives away more than it seems to. If the numbing worked, no one would need to do it every time, so the phrase quietly admits that it doesn't. The fourth line swells, doubling its structure with "smoke another, or drink another," as if the habits were piling up faster than the poem can hold them.
The word "another" does a lot of work. It appears in "another meal," twice in line four, and again in "just another way," four times in all. In line four it loses its noun entirely: another what? Cigarette, drink, it doesn't say. The things themselves have stopped mattering and become interchangeable units, measured only by repetition. When the final line calls the whole list "just another way," the poem folds everything into one more item on the pile. Escalation sits inside the wording too. "Deeper" is a comparative, which suggests this cut is worse than the last.
The grammar adds to the tension. Four "Every time" clauses hang unfinished, and the main verb, "Is," does not arrive until the last line. The reader is kept waiting for a verdict. That verb is also singular, so the four clauses seem to be gathered into one gesture, repeated in different forms.
The imagery rests on one metaphor, and the first line plants it. Volume belongs to sound, so pain is imagined as a noise that has to be covered by a louder one. Each act is another turn of the dial. Then "drown" brings in water, and the word begins to sound dangerous. To silence the pain, the speaker's "you" goes under. Judging by the wording, the poem sees the cure as resembling the harm. The small word "just" sets the tone: flat, tired and unshocked. The poem does not scold or give advice. It sounds like someone who has seen through the pattern.
It is also never made clear who "you" is. It could be a friend addressed with sad understanding, or a person talking to themselves. Either way the second person pulls the reader into the poem's frame and makes it hard to stand outside and judge.
The poem is significant because it moves attention from what people do to why they do it. In a few lines it suggests that the useful question is less "why are you doing that?" than "what are you trying not to hear?" Readers who recognise themselves in the list may take from its logic that the thing to talk about is the pain underneath, ideally with someone they trust, rather than the habit on the surface.