"Somebody" is the loaded word in this poem. The speaker's parents want him to become one, a doctor or an economist, and he answers by wanting to be "nobody". The title names him Rishi, so I'll treat the speaker as Rishi. It also promises a revolt, but the one that follows is strange and quiet. There are no slammed doors or dramatic exits. There is only a young man who drifts out of a prescribed life and ends up cleaning a supermarket floor.
The poem's emotional centre is the parents, who are seen as people trapped in costumes. They are "attached to the roles they played" and "couldn't be who they really were". The long, breathless line that carries this thought ends on a jolt: "did they ever know their worth before the plane crashed into the earth." The poem never explains the crash. It could be literal or a metaphor for a collapse, and the text alone doesn't settle it. What it does is rhyme "worth" with "earth", so that a sentence about wasted potential ends in a thud. Even the speaker's pity for his parents is bound up with fear of becoming them. He plays along "more as an homage" than from passion, and the casual "Jim or Jack Jones" shows how interchangeable that borrowed life feels. A name like that belongs to nobody in particular, which makes the later wish for nobodyhood sound less like nihilism and more like escape.
Formally, the poem reads like a confession typed out one sentence at a time. Most lines stand alone as their own stanza, with white space after each, as if the speaker needs a breath before the next admission. There is no steady metre. A few lines sprawl across the page, especially the ones about his parents and about university, and these loosen into prose when his thoughts tangle. Rhyme appears only in glints: "right" and "fight" click together early, and "worth" and "earth" land like a dropped weight. Repetition does more of the structural work. "I could be… I could be anything" gives way to "I wanted… I wanted… I wanted and wanted", and the shift from ability to desire marks his move from obedience to longing. The poem is also honest about his weakness: "I rarely tried, hoping they would just fruit to life". Turning "fruit" into a verb is a small, odd choice that makes wishes sound like crops he expects to grow without being planted.
The imagery is organic and then hollow. A "kernel" suggests a core self buried under expectation, and a "rising sea of emotions" suggests something he cannot tame. University is described in terms of emptiness: it "couldn't fill me and only made me feel more empty". Against all this, "cleaning" becomes the one way "to vacate my mind". The verb is nicely double-edged, since he empties a space and empties himself at once. The word "special" also hints at something close to sacred in this mundane place. The poem may nudge us toward this with the name Rishi, which in Sanskrit means a sage or seer, though the text never says so.
The ending lets the air out. The inner voice laughs, "It's just a supermarket, kid!", so he undercuts his own epiphany before a reader can. Then the tannoy summons him to "aisle six", and the final line, "An aisle filled with sick", answers with a sour near-rhyme on "six" and "sick". The bathos is deliberate. The sacred has been called back to the spill that needs mopping. There is a bitter irony too, which I read as intended. A doctor, the career he refused, would also spend a life among the sick, and he has ended up facing a smaller, messier version of it.
The poem is significant because it refuses a tidy rebellion. It admits that escaping other people's ambitions can look like anticlimax, and it suggests that anonymous work may offer a strange peace. Whether that peace is freedom or just avoidance, the poem leaves for the reader to decide.