Hating mornings is usually a joke about alarm clocks. In Vlada Onica's "11 AM" it is something sadder. Each waking brings back a person who is no longer there. The central idea is that what hurts most is not the loss of the beloved's face, touch or smell, but the loss of the self who felt "tremendous" beside them.
The most surprising lines are the admission that "I don't remember your touch / Or your smell." We expect love poems to be crowded with such details. Here memory has stripped them away and left one feeling, and that feeling belongs to the speaker, not to the other person. The beloved is almost a blank, defined by a single fact: "you were here." Presence is the whole memory. The poem then sets two identical gestures side by side. In the past, "I opened my eyes / And you were here." In the present, "I open my eyes and go back to my life." The action is the same and the result is opposite. The phrase "go back to" makes ordinary life sound like a place the speaker is sent back to, not one they choose.
The imagery is sparse, and that makes the few images stand out. The one real metaphor is the speaker's "first thought" that "Flies directly into your arms." The thought behaves like a homing bird, and "directly" suggests it acts automatically, before the waking mind can remember the truth. The next line drops it: "But you're so far away." Later the good days "Haunt" the speaker, which casts the happiness itself as the ghost. The past is not painful because it was bad. It is painful because it was good.
The poem is free verse, with no rhyme scheme and no steady meter. The short lines sound like someone talking quietly to themselves, with casual phrases like "Cause," "pretty easy" and "a tear or two." There is almost no punctuation, so thoughts run into one another the way they do half-awake. The isolated line "Good days" works like a murmured correction, as if the speaker insists on the past's worth even while it hurts. The grammar slips here too: "the memory of those days / Good days / Haunt me." The verb agrees with "days," not "memory," so the days themselves become the haunting subject, whether by design or by accident. The capital "I" at the start turns into a lowercase "i" in later lines. One could read this as the speaker shrinking as the poem goes on, but it may simply be informal typing, so it is only a possibility.
Repetition gives the poem its shape. "Hate" appears three times, and the frame matters: the poem opens with "I hate mornings that remind me of you" and closes with "lately, i hate every morning." At the start the hatred has a cause, and by the end the cause has dropped out of the sentence. The grief has spread from one trigger to the whole day. "Wake up" is also repeated, first as a plain event ("When I wake up") and then as a refusal ("I really don't want to wake up"). Notice too where the hatred is aimed. It lands on mornings, not on the person, which is perhaps the only safe target for someone who still misses the one they cannot blame.
The poem is full of small contradictions that it never settles. The speaker's life is "pretty easy / But complicated." The good days were "a long time ago," yet they haunt "lately." The grief is reduced to "a tear or two," an understatement that reads as someone not wanting to make a fuss. The title "11 AM" is never explained. Judging by the content, it might point to a late, reluctant waking, a morning stretched out because getting up is unwelcome, but that is only an inference.
The poem's value lies in its plainness and honesty. It offers no consolation and no turn toward healing, and it ends worse than it began. It also catches something true about longing: it often shows up not in grand gestures but in the first few seconds after opening your eyes, when the mind reaches for someone and finds nothing there.