But Mr Can You Maybe Listen Theres - Analysis

A plea to the person in charge, and the fear of being misheard

The poem reads like someone trying to get a word in with a gatekeeper—an employer, an official, a teacher, any mr who controls access and decides what counts as sense. The central claim is blunt: some people get to treat the future like a sweet they can sample at will, while others are left with a future so reduced it barely qualifies as a future at all. From the first line—but mr can you maybe listen there’s—the speaker sounds apologetic and hurried, as if already anticipating dismissal. The broken phrasing (me & / some people / and others please) turns conversation into a scramble: the speaker is trying to sort the world into groups, but even that basic sorting feels dangerous, because the powerful listener might don'tconfuse them with the wrong group. The tone is both pleading and defensive, like someone who has learned that to be misunderstood is to be punished.

The toothsome future: privilege as casual consumption

When the poem describes Some / people whose future is toothsome, it chooses a startling adjective: the future is not hopeful or bright or secure; it is edible. Those people have pockets full and can take a littl / e nibble now And then / bite—they can consume tomorrow in advance. The parenthetical aside ((they got / pockets full...)) feels like the speaker leaning in to explain what the listener should already know: money makes time pliable. Calling that future candy sharpens the critique. Candy is a treat, unnecessary for survival; it’s also something you can hoard in your pocket and eat whenever you like. The future, for this group, becomes a private stash, not a shared horizon. Even the word toothsome suggests the body’s ease—good teeth, good appetite, the leisure to snack—an ease the speaker will soon deny himself.

The bright future that flies: aspiration strained against the sky

Then another group appears: others / fly,their;puLLing:bright / futures / against the deep sky. This image changes the meaning of bright. Bright here isn’t simply promising; it’s something you drag. The odd punctuation and stressed letters in puLLing make the effort visible. These people are not eating the future; they are harnessed to it, hauling it against something vast and indifferent—the deep sky. Even the verb fly is complicated: flying can mean freedom, but it can also mean being forced into motion, swept along. The poem refuses a clean ladder of merit—moneyed candy-eaters at the top, noble fliers in the middle, and the speaker at the bottom. Instead, it suggests multiple ways the future can be possessed or burdensome. Privilege tastes sweet; aspiration strains; and below both is something worse than struggle.

May mine’s—a springtime word for a crushed present

The poem’s hinge comes with the speaker’s attempt to place himself: May mine’s tou / ching this crump / led cap. After the deep sky, we drop suddenly to a crushed hat on the ground—an image of poverty so ordinary it’s humiliating. The word May is crucial. May is the month of bright beginnings, blossoms, light; it’s also the modal verb of permission. The phrase May mine’s can sound like spring, but also like a question: may my future be anything other than this? Yet what it touches is not candy, not sky, but a crump / led cap: a container that no longer holds its shape, like a life whose possibilities have been stepped on.

The speaker can barely articulate what he’s trying to say—mumble some / thing—and that mumbling is aimed at oh no / body. The spacing turns nobody into no body, as if the speaker is talking not only to no one, but also from a place of being treated as bodiless, negligible. The parenthetical interruption—(can you give / a)listen—repeats the original plea in a smaller, more desperate voice. The poem’s emotional movement is downward: from categorizing society, to locating the self, to discovering that even speech fails because there is no assured listener.

Who may you be? Authority as an empty pronoun

The address to the listener becomes accusatory and bewildered: who may / you / be / any / how? The earlier mr seemed like a concrete figure, but by the end, you turns slippery—less a person than a role, a function that withholds attention. The question doesn’t simply challenge the listener’s identity; it questions the legitimacy of the whole arrangement in which one person gets to decide whether another is heard. The tone shifts here from pleading to a kind of exhausted defiance. The speaker has tried politeness—maybe listen—and now he presses the unsettling possibility that the authority he’s begging is not substantial at all, just a pronoun propped up by habit and fear.

The final descent: the future as cigarette waste

The poem ends on its bleakest image: down / to / smoking / found / Butts. This is not merely poverty; it is scavenging what others have already used and discarded. If the privileged have candy in their pockets, the speaker has cigarette ends in the gutter. The word found matters: nothing is given, nothing is earned in any dignified sense—only discovered by searching the ground. Even the capitalization of Butts gives the refuse a grim importance, as if this is what the world has promoted into the speaker’s main resource, his substitute for a future. In that light, the earlier images look even harsher: candy implies choice; flying implies effort; smoking found butts implies sheer endurance, living off the leftovers of other people’s days.

A sharper question the poem won’t let go of

If the speaker is mumbleing to no / body, the poem raises an uncomfortable possibility: maybe the system doesn’t merely refuse to listen; maybe it needs some voices to sound like mumbling so it can keep calling them incoherent. The repeated request for a listen is not just about courtesy—it is about whether the speaker is allowed to be intelligible at all. In a world where some futures are toothsome, what happens to language itself when your mouth is busy surviving?