Five lines, each standing alone like a separate thought, and yet Jason Ridpath's "Auditory Hallucinations II" travels from this exact second to the far end of everything. It opens with the plainest claim imaginable, "Now is all we really have," and closes by picturing what will be left lying around once we are gone. In between, it asks a quietly unsettling question: if the present is all we own, what becomes of us when it runs out?
The structure does much of the work. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Instead, every line is its own stanza, ringed by white space, so the poem reads like a run of pronouncements surfacing one at a time. The title may explain this. Auditory hallucinations are voices heard without a source, and these lines have that quality: flat, unattributed statements that arrive without argument. The numeral "II" suggests a sequence, though this text alone does not tell us what it belongs to.
The handling of time is especially careful. The first line is built almost entirely from short, simple words, and the casual "really" makes it sound like something said aloud rather than carved in stone. The second line stretches out and hedges: "tomorrow will likely come." Even tomorrow is only probable, and that small word "likely" quietly drains the comfort from the sentence. Then comes the longest line, and the diction shifts. "One day, it shall not pass" uses the formal, almost biblical "shall," while "will" turns up a few words later in the same line. The pronoun "it" is also ambiguous. It might be tomorrow, or time itself. If a day arrives and never passes, time has stopped. The comma that does a full stop's job ("it shall not pass, instead it will be…") makes the sentence tumble forward without a pause.
That line also contains the poem's most striking phrase: our "essence" will "have the last laugh." The idiom is dark humour with a touch of personification, giving our deepest nature a mouth and a sense of mischief. But the poem refuses to let this triumph stand. The very next line, "Everything will be repurposed, recycled, or re-used," swaps the grand vocabulary of essence for the language of waste management. The three verbs share the prefix "re-", which means "again," so the line itself loops back on itself. The effect is deflating. If everything is endlessly reshuffled, it is hard to say what is left of anyone's essence.
The final line settles the matter, or perhaps unsettles it. "What remains will be artefacts" is the language of museums and excavations, of objects dug up and labelled. The poem says nothing of souls or memories, only of things. Those things are "an expression of a nature that wasn't built to last," and "built" turns living beings into constructions with a limited lifespan. "Nature" is cleverly open. It could mean human nature, or the natural world, or both. The line also echoes the earlier "last laugh," but the word shifts its sense. In the first case "last" means final, and in the second it means endure. The paradox is that what survives is the evidence of something never meant to survive.
That is what makes the poem worth reading closely. In five lines it holds two opposed ideas about endings, one in which something of us triumphs and one in which we become reusable material and museum pieces. It does not say which is true, and the abrupt contrast between lofty and bureaucratic words lets readers feel the tension for themselves. Its advice is also oddly double-edged. If the future is uncertain and the afterlife of our "essence" is only residue, then "now" is the one thing that is properly ours. The poem never tells us whether to find that frightening or freeing, and the choice is left to the reader.
For students, it shows how much a few words can carry. A hedge like "likely," a shifted verb like "shall," or a single prefix repeated three times can steer the meaning as strongly as any long argument.