Most complaints about other people end with a verdict on them. Vlada Onica's "Not Understandable" starts out that way and then swerves, and the swerve is what makes the poem worth reading.
The opening is plain, almost deflated: the speaker is "always surrounded / By people" and finds them hard to read. The first image is a comic one. People behave "as if they fell from the 9th cloud / And hit their head of the asphalt." It echoes the familiar idea of being on cloud nine, a place of bliss, and drops it onto pavement. The contrast between soft and hard, high and low, gives us dazed, slightly stumbling figures who seem to have come down to earth the wrong way. The odd phrasing of "hit their head of the asphalt" adds to this, since the sentence itself feels a little off balance, like the people it describes.
The middle of the poem moves from observation to feeling. "They make me sad, they make me happy / They cry and laugh with me" is built from matched pairs, so the speaker's emotional life seems to swing as evenly as a seesaw. Then the rhythm breaks: "Or they leave. And forget." The full stop in the middle of the line works like a door closing, and the second sentence is a single word of verb, bare and quick. What follows is the poem's real wound. The others are "marvelous without me" while the speaker stays "miserable without them." The two adjectives share their opening *m* and their final "without," so they sound like mirror images, yet the verbs part them. People *leave*; the speaker *stays*. The lopsidedness is the whole complaint in one sentence.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre, and that suits its voice, which sounds like someone thinking aloud. Line lengths jump around. "By people" sits alone as a two-word line, which makes the crowd feel at once close and cut off. Later, "Complicated" gets a line of its own, and its four syllables take a long moment to say, as if the word itself were tangled. The question "Why?" is another stand-alone beat, and the poem seems to hesitate before answering it.
The answer arrives in a mock-formal register: "Well, my two statements for today." The numbering ("One; ... Yet, there's the two;") makes the speaker sound like a debater, or someone keeping a ledger of conclusions. The word "today" matters too. It marks these as provisional findings, not eternal truths, and gives the poem the feel of a diary entry. The first statement is generous. The speaker will never fully understand "the one I love or one I hate," because "it's just how people are." Hate and love are placed side by side here, and both are said to be matters that don't require full understanding.
Then comes the last line: "I am the most complicated one." It can be read as a joke at the speaker's own expense, since claiming the superlative is a little vain, and nobody could really check it. It also works as a confession. If everyone is complicated, and the speaker is the most so, then the speaker is the person least understood, perhaps even by themselves. The title, "Not Understandable," never says who it refers to, and the ending quietly turns it around. The people who puzzled the speaker may have been puzzled by the speaker all along.
What makes the poem significant is how honestly it moves from blame to self-recognition in so few lines. It makes no grand argument and offers no tidy solution. It simply catches a very ordinary mood, the loneliness of being left and the stubborn decision to "still try to understand," and then ends on a twist that is funny and uncomfortable at once. Many readers will recognise that feeling of being sure everyone else is a mystery, until the thought arrives that you are one too.