Most poems about despair hide behind metaphor. HisSiren's "To Carry On" talks straight to the reader. It opens with a flat statement, "To carry on with life is hard," and then does something unsettling. It turns the temptation of suicide into a presence "always lurking behind a shadow," something you could address by name. "Have you reached out to it yet? / Called its name?" The phrase "reached out" usually means asking for help, and here it points the opposite way. That small twist shows how the speaker's thinking has been bent by pain.
The poem's central idea is the gap between the self other people see and the self that is actually surviving. Outwardly the speaker is adored. People "follow behind me," "beg me to take them," and "tell me I'm perfect." The word "follow" may hint at an audience, though the poem never says so. Being idealised doesn't comfort the speaker, though. It isolates them: "I tell myself its lies... Why won't you admit it?" That last question is odd and revealing. The speaker is not fishing for compliments but begging to be seen as flawed and real. Praise becomes another mask, joining the "happy face a smile all the time." When the speaker asks, "Do you use a facade?", the poem turns from confession into an invitation to the reader.
The form suits this honesty. There is no regular rhythm and no rhyme scheme. Lines run from a few words ("Called its name?") to long, breathless ones ("Behind this happy face a smile all the time"). Punctuation drops away when emotion rises, as in "But no I keep it locked up," where the rush of words feels like someone gripping a door shut. Questions scatter across the first half of the poem, pulling the reader into a conversation. Midway through the speaker slides from "I" into "you": "And you try so hard not to, / But the doubts come back." Perhaps "I" is too exposed at that moment, or perhaps the speaker wants to say that this experience is shared.
The sound and shape of the poem grow more fragmented as it nears its low point. "No escape, no drugs, no alcohol, no nothing but pain. / No torture, no cutting, no nothing the same." The repeated "no" works like a door closing again and again. The second line's grammar nearly collapses ("no nothing the same"), as if language itself is giving out. Only "pain" and "same" echo each other faintly, so the rhyme never settles into a pattern. Then the vocabulary turns physical and violent: "the tearing apart of my love and hope." Loss of motivation is described as something happening to the speaker, not something they do: "My will for everything just disappears."
One detail is easy to miss. The speaker's wish isn't dramatic. It is "the need to let go for just a minute." The scream is silent, "in my head," and the release "will never come." This is exhaustion, not a flirtation with death. The speaker also admits the moments of rescue: "that person comes along and says: 'Don't worry, because I'm here.'" But the poem is honest that kindness doesn't fix everything, since the doubts return "like never before."
The ending refuses a tidy resolution. The title and first line use the bare phrase "to carry on," but the last line makes it personal and uncertain: "But I try to carry on......." The word "try" matters, and so does the ellipsis, with its extra dots trailing off like a breath that isn't finished. Nothing is solved. The poem simply keeps going, and that is its point.
That is what makes it significant. It is rough-edged and unpolished, and that rawness is part of its truth. It shows that someone who seems loved and "perfect" can still be struggling, and that continuing, even tentatively, can be an act of strength. If the poem feels close to home, the "I'm here" it describes is worth looking for: a trusted adult, a friend, a counsellor.