Four short lines, and the poem is over before a reader has settled in. That brevity is part of its force. Jason Ridpath's "Princess III" builds no argument about addiction or regret. It lays out a few admissions in a flat voice and lets the final image do the damage. The poem comes with no context, so everything below rests on the words themselves.
The opening is split by punctuation. Grammar wants one sentence: "All my old ways haunt me again." Instead a full stop separates "All my old ways." from "Haunt me again." The subject hangs alone for a moment, and the verb arrives as a separate, reluctant sentence. It can also be read as a command, with "Haunt me again" addressed to the old ways themselves. On that reading the speaker is not just a victim of a relapse but half-wishing for one. The poem never settles the question, and that ambiguity is its most interesting move. "Haunt" and "again" together suggest a cycle: these habits are ghosts that have been put to rest before and keep returning.
Then the poem lengthens. After two lines of three or four words comes a single line of about sixteen, running on without a pause as if the habit were expanding to fill the space available. The list begins with two hard, specific nouns, "Cocaine, alcohol," and ends on something vaguer and smaller: "the silly mind games that I play to stay awake." The word "silly" is striking. It shrinks the speaker's own behaviour to something childish, as if embarrassment or deflection were at work. "To stay awake" is also open. It might mean the literal sleeplessness of a long night, the effect of a stimulant, or a refusal to go numb. Whichever it is, wakefulness sits uneasily close to the grave that closes the poem, as if sleep were a rehearsal for something permanent.
That last line carries the poem's widest turn: "Just avoiding the parade as were shuffling closer to our grave." "Just" does the same minimising work as "silly," making avoidance sound casual and harmless. A parade is public, bright and communal, and the speaker steps away from it. But "shuffling" is not how a parade moves. It is the slow, dragging movement of tired feet, and it hints that the parade is really a procession, perhaps a funeral one, with everyone walking in the same direction. The pronouns shift too. The poem has been all "my" and "me," then "we" and "our" appear in the closing line. A private confession turns into a statement about everyone, and the grave is singular, a shared destination. The missing apostrophe in "were" leaves the line a little rough, which suits a voice that sounds unpolished and unperformed, whether by accident or design.
Formally, the poem has no rhyme scheme and no regular metre, but it has an ear. The line endings "ways," "awake" and "grave" share a long "a" sound, with "play" echoing inside the third line, so a faint chime runs under the free verse. Every line ends in a full stop. With no enjambment, each statement is closed off like an entry in a log, and the deadpan rhythm makes the content harder to look away from.
The title adds a puzzle. The word "Princess" never appears in the text, and the numeral suggests the poem belongs to a sequence, though that is an inference and the text offers nothing about the other parts. A regal title set against such grubby material could be ironic, or it could name someone the speaker is thinking of. Either way, it makes the reader feel that something has been left out.
The poem's significance lies in its restraint. It doesn't glamorise drugs as rebellion or deliver a lecture. It offers no recovery and no moral, only a speaker who plays down his own habits with words like "silly" and "just," and then shows that the same logic of shuffling forward applies to everyone. In so few words, it shows how a small, private weakness can open onto the most universal fact there is.