The breakup in "Red" is already underway by the second line. "Now you're leaving" is in the present tense, so the loss happens as we read. The next line, "Behind a flurry of texts," has no verb and hangs loose. We can't tell whether the departure is delivered through the messages or the messages are what's left behind. Either way, the goodbye is mediated by a screen, and the speaker is left sorting through the debris. The poem's central idea is that heartbreak scrambles perception. The speaker can no longer tell what feelings mean, tries to rid himself of them, and only makes the picture blurrier.
That confusion is clearest in the question "What colour is red?" It sounds like something a small child would ask, and the answer should be obvious. The poem treats the question as unanswerable, because red can stand for love, anger or pain, and after "Everything I've loved turned to regret" the speaker can't separate them. The next lines add violence and a new colour. "Smash my fist into my head" rhymes with "red," which ties the colour directly to self-punishment. Whether the blow is literal or figurative, the anger has turned inward. Then "Infatuation blues" brings in blue as sadness and as the musical form of lament, so the palette shifts from hot to cold within a few lines.
The middle of the poem turns on one repeated word. "I was crazy for you" is about desire, but "Working crazily hard too" reuses the root for something else. The speaker may be fleeing into work, or may be showing that his whole life runs at the same frantic pitch. The small word "too" gives the line a tired, piled-on feeling, like another item added to an overloaded list. "Living on the dark side of the moon" is a familiar phrase, but it fits. That side is the one we never see, permanently turned away, and it suggests isolation more than drama.
The form matches the mood. This is free verse with no regular metre, and almost every line is a short, self-contained sentence or fragment, with white space between them. The rhythm stops and starts, as if the speaker can't hold a thought for long. The longest line, "Everything I've loved turned to regret," lands like a verdict. Rhyme appears only in scraps: red and head, then blue, you and too, then moon and zoom. These echoes never settle into a scheme. They feel like leftovers of a song that has fallen apart, which suits the "blues" in the middle of the poem.
The closing run of lines is the most carefully built. "Rid me of red. / Rid me of blue. / Rid me of the flowers." repeats the same plea, and "rid" sounds almost like "red," so the word seems to be erasing itself. The first two requests are about colours, which are abstract moods. The third is about something solid. The poem doesn't say what the flowers are, but judging by the pattern they seem to be a physical reminder of the relationship, perhaps a gift. Moving from feelings to an object makes the wish to delete the past more specific and more painful.
Then comes the final image: "Out of focus. / Too much zoom." After texts, flowers and colours, the poem ends on the language of a camera or phone screen. The picture is that he has looked so closely at the relationship and his pain that everything has dissolved into blur. The lines are also oddly flat. There is no healing, no insight and no final outburst, only a complaint about the settings.
That lack of resolution is a large part of what makes the poem worth reading. It offers an old subject, a lover leaving, in a modern vocabulary of messages, zooming and focus. It also shows how much a very short poem can do with repetition, sound and a single recurring colour. Its refusal to tidy up the pain makes it feel honest, and the reader is left, like the speaker, staring at something too close to see clearly.