The first line sounds like something a bitter friend mutters over coffee: "Trust in humans will send you crazy." The poem doesn't argue the point. It just offers evidence. "John lost his baby. Judy got lazy." A catastrophe and a small failing get the same flat, gossipy weight, and that levelling is the point. It is how people sum each other up, in a sentence and without context. Then the speaker drops the observer's pose with "Nobody can save me," and the poem turns from other people's faults to its own.
Listen to what the opening does with sound. "Crazy," "baby," "lazy" and "me" all end on the same long *-ee*. "Crazy" and "lazy" are a true rhyme, "baby" a looser echo, and together they chime like a nursery rhyme or a playground taunt. The tune is cheerful and the content is not, which makes the chant feel faintly cruel. After that the poem largely gives up end-rhyme and breaks into fragments, but sound keeps working underneath. "Infused" and "confused" are a rhyming pair that explains itself: someone filled up with "self-importance" ends up unable to recognise "your self-portrait." "Hexagonal diagonals" is a mouthful of matching syllables that sounds as angular as it looks.
The middle of the poem works as a verbless catalogue: "Abstract artistry. Squares for eyes. Nose out of place." No line has a main verb, so the syntax itself looks like a face taken apart and badly reassembled. The imagery is hard-edged geometry (squares, hexagons, diagonals) laid over something soft and human. "Abstract" is a double-edged word here. It names an art style, but it also means drawn away from the real person. The title, "Art in Human Behaviour IV," suggests that behaviour is the artwork on display. The numeral hints that the poem belongs to a sequence, though it holds together alone.
The pronouns also move. The poem begins with a general "you," then "me," then an accusing "your self-portrait," and finally "my face" and "our days." The distorted portrait is first something that happens to other people, and then the speaker claims it. The face is outlined, only the outline, "painted with lemons." The image works on two senses at once. We see the yellow and then, a line later, taste it: "Bitter be the taste." Anyone who knows the saying about what to do when life hands you lemons will notice that the poem never mentions sugar. It only allows that "sweet *could* be the rest of our days."
That line is the longest in the poem, and its grammar is worth a second look. "Bitter be the taste" is old-fashioned, almost a toast or a blessing, as if the speaker agrees to swallow the bitterness. The second half is conditional, a hope and not a promise. The sentence balances bitter against sweet, but its weight falls on "could."
The last line is a command with no listener: "Unshackle these chains." It is oddly doubled, since "unshackle" and "chains" say nearly the same thing, and the repetition makes the speaker sound stuck. It also quietly contradicts "Nobody can save me." If no one can help, why ask? The plea suggests the speaker cannot quite stop hoping, even after declaring hope pointless. The chains are never named. They could be distrust, other people's judgements, or the distorted self-image the poem has just described. That openness is deliberate, and it leaves the reader to decide.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It takes a worn-out complaint about people and recasts it as a problem of images: we paint ourselves and each other, and the result comes out with squares for eyes. The poem refuses a tidy resolution. It gives a bitter taste, a conditional sweetness and a request that may have no one to answer it, and in that sense it is honest about how hard it is to trust either other people or your own reflection.