Ten short lines, and in six of them the word "you" or "your" appears. Victor Mahaney's "Because of you" is built around a person who is addressed, accused and never answers. The speaker explains self-harm as the result of another person's rejection, and the poem's whole shape follows from that claim.
It begins with an accusation: "Because of you, / I cut." The verb has no object. We are never told what is cut or how, and that bareness is more unsettling than detail would be. The line break after "cut" leaves the word alone for a beat before the explanation arrives: "To make me feel something." The phrase suggests numbness, as though pain has become the only proof of being alive. Then the opening phrase returns, "Because of you," now ending in a full stop. The repetition frames the self-harm on both sides with the same blame, and the punctuation makes the phrase ambiguous. It can look back at the cutting or forward at what follows: "Because of you. / I am alone, / Forever." Either way, the cause is the same and the speaker takes no share of it.
"Forever" sits on a line of its own, and the isolation of the word acts out its meaning. It is also an absolute, the kind of word a hurting person reaches for when the present feels endless. The poem asks us to hear this as a feeling, not a prediction, and that gap between how things feel and how they might be is part of what makes it affecting.
The second half changes direction. The accusation turns into a question: "Did you forget, / I was you baby girl?" Judging by the endearment and the idea of being thrown out of someone's world, the "you" may be a parent or another person who once held the speaker close, though the poem never says so. The word "you" where we would expect "your" could be a slip, but it also makes the line blur the two people together: "I was you." The speaker's identity is tangled up with the person who left. The endearment "baby girl" is tender, and here it becomes a weapon, because it recalls a closeness that no longer exists. The tense shifts too. The first half is in the present ("I cut," "I am alone"), while the second looks back ("I was," "threw"). The rejection is over, and its consequences are not.
The final sentence is the poem's most carefully made moment: "You threw me, / Out of your world." The comma and line break make the phrase "Out of your world" hang in the air, as if it had been thrown. "Threw" treats the speaker like an object, something discarded. And the world belongs entirely to the other person, so the speaker is left with none of her own. There is also a faint sound-link, since "girl" and "world" nearly rhyme. It is the closest the poem comes to rhyme, and it ties the tender word to the cruel one in the last line. Otherwise the poem is in free verse, with short, halting lines that read like someone speaking in a stifled voice. The indented lines "I cut" and "I am alone" add to this, as if the speaker is shrinking back from her own statements.
There is almost no decoration here. No extended metaphor softens the message, and the plain vocabulary of "cut," "alone," "forget" and "threw" gives the poem its force. It reads less like crafted art than like testimony, and that rawness is its main quality.
The poem also leaves things out. It offers no comfort or resolution and gives the other person no chance to reply. Because it is told from one wounded point of view, readers should remember that the speaker is a voice in the poem, not necessarily the poet. For students, it shows how a poem can make a painful subject understandable without glamorizing it. It also leaves a quiet question hanging over its last line: who is there to listen? If the feelings in it sound familiar, talking to a trusted adult is a real step toward being heard.