Jason Ridpath's "Decade" never says what is happening to its speaker. It gives us thirteen short fragments and leaves us to work out how they connect. Nothing is named outright: the crack could be in a wall, a dam, a relationship or a self. What comes through is a movement from alarm to emptiness and then to a strange, steady clarity. The central idea seems to be that a first real truth, perhaps about love, arrives only after something has begun to break.
The opening lines set up a world in slow collapse. "Crack expanding. / Water still trickling." Both phrases are built on present participles, so the damage is never finished. The word "still" adds a faint dread, as if the trickle is a small warning of something larger. Then comes "Sirens wail from the abyss." Sirens are modern alarms, but they are also the figures of myth who lure sailors toward danger. The next line, "I follow the cry," supports the second reading. The speaker is not fleeing the emergency but walking toward it, and the poem never explains why.
What follows is a run of near-blank images: "Mind vacant. / Mortality adrift. / Waiting for the key shift." Here the grammar thins out. There are no verbs of action, only states, which makes the speaker feel suspended. "Adrift" carries on the water imagery, so the abstract idea of mortality becomes something floating on a current. "Key shift" is pleasingly double. It could be a key turning in a lock, or a change of key in music, the moment a piece moves into a new emotional register. Judging by the poem's overall movement, a change of that kind is exactly what the speaker is waiting for.
The middle of the poem turns on the pair "Run towards me. / Run from me." These are the only imperatives, and they contradict each other. The repeated "me" gives the lines a mirror-like symmetry, while the meaning pulls in opposite directions. They read as the push and pull of an intimate relationship, where someone is both invited closer and warned away. It is unclear who is speaking or being addressed. The ambiguity is probably deliberate, since it makes the speaker both the one who chases and the one who is chased.
After this tension the poem steadies. "Doubtless horizon" is the first moment of certainty, and the line is almost startling after so much instability. A horizon is a line that holds still when everything else drifts. Then "Love in its infancy" arrives, and the word "infancy" quietly answers "mortality" a few lines earlier. Death and beginnings sit side by side, and the title "Decade" may hint at a span of ten years in which they meet, though the poem itself gives no explicit evidence for this. The sound of "infancy" also faintly echoes the earlier "me," so the poem seems to be reaching toward rhyme without ever fully committing to it.
The ending is the most carefully controlled part. "Indigo blue" is a colour, but it is also a mood, the shade between sea and night, depth and sky. It links back to the water of the opening and gathers the poem's imagery into one hue. The final line, "My first truth," is the only moment where the speaker claims something as their own. It is brief, flat and unadorned, and the poem stops there without explaining it.
Formally, the poem has no regular rhyme scheme and no steady metre. Instead, its rhythm comes from the repeated short, stressed phrase: two or three beats, a full stop, a pause. The full stops and white space between lines work like breaths or held silences. Each fragment lands with equal weight, so crisis, emptiness and love feel equally important.
That economy is what makes "Decade" worth reading closely. It shows how much a poem can do with very little, using pressure, gaps and carefully chosen words to create an atmosphere rather than tell a story. We are left to decide what the crack is, who is running, and what the first truth might be.