Eleven short lines, almost no decoration, and very little standing between the reader and the speaker's pain: that is the unusual force of Lance Harbison's "Ending". The poem is about a person who has run out of reasons to continue. Its central idea is how despair feels from inside, as a slow subtraction of confidence, worth and strength until only one thought remains.
The title does a lot of work. "Ending" could mean the end of hope, the end of endurance, or the end of a life, and by the final line all three have merged. Nothing in the poem suggests a way forward, so the word reads less like a title than a verdict.
The poem is built as a descent. It opens with loss: "Ive lost all confidence / Given up / I have nothing left." These lines are bare statements, each emptier than the one before, and "nothing left" suggests a container tipped out. Then comes a small, almost reasonable admission, "Im not perfect", followed by a leap that the logic cannot justify: "And it seems that i was never worth it." This is the longest line in the poem, as if the thought runs on once it gets started. It also shows a painful kind of reasoning, in which falling short of perfect becomes proof of having no value at all. The words "it seems" are worth noticing. The speaker presents this as a perception rather than a fact, and "never" rewrites the whole past in the same bleak colour.
The poem's sense of being worn down shows in its language. "Ive grown physically sick" places the pain in the body, a reminder that mental suffering is not just "in the head". The next line, "Its grown too tough", repeats "grown", so that both sickness and difficulty seem to expand without the speaker's consent. The only true metaphor arrives next: "A Bottomless pit". It is a familiar image, but its familiarity suits the poem. Despair here does not reach for fresh or clever comparisons, and a pit with no bottom needs no elaboration. It offers no ledge to stop on and no ground to push off from.
Sound and form carry meaning too. There is no regular rhyme scheme and no steady metre, and the lines are short and flat, close to speech. Yet the sounds quietly gather. "Tough" in line seven rhymes with "enough" in the last line, and "enough" also echoes "Given up" from line two, so the poem begins and ends on the same tired vowel. Likewise "worth it" and "pit" share a sound, as though the speaker's value has already sunk into the hole. Punctuation is almost absent, and the lowercase "i" and missing apostrophes ("Ive", "Im", "Its") give the text a hurried, unpolished look. Only in the last line does "I've" appear with its apostrophe. Whether that is deliberate or accidental, the effect is a voice that never stops to tidy itself.
The most important choice comes in the final three lines. "Its on my mind / Thoughts of suicide" is the only moment the poem names its subject outright, in the plainest possible words, with no softening. Then the last line shifts to "I wanna leave I've had enough", where "leave" is a gentler, almost casual word for the same thing. The speaker can state the word and still reach for a euphemism, which feels true to how people often talk about their darkest thoughts. It is also worth noticing that no one else appears in the poem. There is no "you", no friend, no family, only a repeated "I". The isolation is built into the grammar.
The poem's significance lies in this honesty. It does not argue, console or resolve, and it does not turn pain into something beautiful. For a reader, especially a young one, that plainness can be valuable, because it shows what suicidal thinking can sound like from inside: exhausted, self-critical and convinced it is permanent. The poem also quietly shows how distorted that conviction is, since "it seems" is not the same as "it is".
If any of these feelings sound familiar, it is worth telling someone you trust, such as a friend, a family member, a teacher or school counsellor, or a local crisis line. The speaker of this poem has no one to talk to, but you do not have to be in that position.