Within four lines, the speaker of Jason Ridpath's "Coping With the Pain IV" has asked for something and then taken it back. The wish begins modestly: "I just want to feel something regular." It sharpens to "something real," shrinks to a bare "I just want to feel," and then collapses: "I don't want to feel anything at all." The poem is about being caught between numbness and overwhelm, wanting emotion because its absence is unbearable and wanting its absence because emotion hurts. Its central idea is that this contradiction is not a puzzle to solve but a condition to live inside. The speaker says so outright: "Living in paradoxical pairs."
The opening choices of words are telling. "Regular" is an unglamorous word. The speaker does not ask for joy or love, only for ordinary feeling, the kind most people never notice having. "Real" then suggests that whatever the speaker feels now seems artificial or distant. The repeated "just" makes each request sound small and almost apologetic, which makes the reversal in line four more painful. The shrinking pattern, from two qualified wishes to one unqualified one to a flat refusal, shows a mind talking itself out of hope.
The middle section turns this paradox outward, into self-criticism. "I'm too fat. / I'm too skinny. / I'm too small. / I'm too tall." The word "too" implies a standard, but the poem never says whose. That silence is part of the point, because the speaker has absorbed a judgement and no longer needs a judge. The pairs cancel each other out, so no one could satisfy them all. "Small," "tall" and "all" also rhyme, and the rhyme closes with a bitter joke: "I've got it all." Here the phrase means the reverse of its usual sense. The speaker has every flaw, and no one could read the line as boasting.
The same logic moves from body to behaviour: "I'm too talkative. / I don't say nothing at all." The double negative is a small trap. Literally, "don't say nothing" means "do say something," so the sentence contradicts itself even as it describes silence. Whether Ridpath intended this or simply used everyday speech, it fits. The speaker is both too much and too little, and even the grammar cannot settle on which.
Structurally, the poem is a staircase of single lines, each separated by white space. The sentences are short and mostly one-syllable, so the lines land like repeated blows or a drumbeat. There is no regular metre, and the free verse suits a voice that sounds like thinking aloud. Rhyme appears only in patches and never settles into a pattern. "Small / tall / all" is one patch. "Pairs / stairs" is another, and it connects two ideas, the paradoxical pairs and the actual stairs the speaker must climb.
That image carries the ending. "Climbing, crawling up the stairs" slides from effort to exhaustion in a single word. Climbing implies purpose, but crawling suggests someone with no energy left. The final line is the longest in the poem and the only one that feels like relief: "There, there, time to fall into the comfy mattress." "There, there" is how we comfort a child, so the speaker has become their own parent, soothing themselves. "Fall" is a revealing verb, since the speaker does not lie down or rest but gives way. "Comfy" is a childish, cosy word, almost too soft for what has come before. Sleep becomes the one place where the opening contradiction goes quiet, because there the speaker can feel nothing without having to decide to.
Taken with its title, the poem suggests that this is what coping looks like: not a cure, but a way of getting through the day. The numeral in the title implies it belongs to a larger sequence, though the poem works fully on its own. Its significance lies in how plainly it handles a hard subject. It uses no elaborate metaphors and no dramatic climax. It uses repetition, small words and an ending that is gentle and slightly unsettling. For a reader who has felt pulled in two directions at once, the poem offers recognition rather than advice, and that may be exactly what makes it worth reading.