Kick It Again - Analysis

Love as something you can physically harm

This poem’s central claim is blunt and bleak: the speaker’s love keeps surviving even as the beloved repeatedly tries to destroy it, and that survival is treated less as a miracle than as a humiliation. From the first lines, love isn’t a feeling so much as a small, exposed creature: a spark of love that the other person returns to kill. The beloved is cast as someone who reliably comes back not to repair anything, but to finish the job they always start.

What makes the metaphor sting is how detailed the violence becomes. The love is weak and tremblin’, hangin’ on by a thread, and the beloved doesn’t just snuff it out—they kicked it, choke it, stepped on it, and broke it, leaving it half to death. The piling-up of actions reads like a list of abuses, as if the speaker is replaying a familiar scene and cannot stop naming each blow.

The refrain that sounds like a dare—and a confession

The repeated command Kick it again is where the poem’s voice gets complicated. On the surface it’s sarcasm, a bitter dare: go ahead, do what you always do. But it also sounds like the speaker is coaching their own erasure, trying to talk themselves into finally stopping this love. The refrain keeps insisting on evidence—it’s still breathing, I think I seen it move, it’s still living—and those small observations betray a tenderness the speaker claims not to have.

That contradiction is the poem’s main tension: the speaker wants the love gone, yet keeps vigil over its last signs of life. Even the tiny phrase little bitty feels involuntary—an affectionate diminutive slipped into a scene of cruelty. The speaker can’t help noticing the love’s persistence, and the noticing itself becomes part of the attachment.

After the break: cruelty stops being symbolic and starts being habitual

The mid-poem pause—[ harmonica - guitar ]—functions like a breath between rounds, a moment where you can hear the songness of it, but also the repetition of the pattern. When the speaker returns, they shift from describing past harm to forecasting future attempts: You’re gonna have to do much more this time. The love has adapted; it can now survive what used to be fatal.

Here the poem narrows in on specific methods of damage: a-cheatin’ doesn’t work, and shame won’t finish it either. Cheating and shaming aren’t described as moral failures but as tactics—ways the beloved has tried to kill the attachment. That’s chilling because it frames emotional betrayal as a tool used deliberately, and it frames the speaker’s love as stubbornly, almost mechanically resilient.

A love that won’t die becomes a kind of curse

The final image makes the love grotesquely alive: raspin’ gaspin’, crawlin’, callin’ to you with each dying breath. Love is no longer dignified longing; it’s a wounded thing dragging itself toward the person hurting it. The tone here is both accusatory and self-disgusted: the speaker condemns the beloved’s violence, but also exposes their own helpless pull back toward that person.

Optional intensification: If the beloved truly wants to kill my love for you, why does the poem keep addressing them so directly—why does the love keep callin’ to you? The darkest implication is that the beloved’s cruelty is not only familiar but magnetic, and that the speaker’s love, by continuing to crawl back, keeps offering itself up for the next kick.