Nine short sentences, and an entire emotional weather system passes through them. Jason Ridpath's "Process" opens with a cheerful status update, "Feeling great.", and within four lines has gone from sunshine to the end of the world. What makes it funny, and then uncomfortably familiar, is how calmly the speaker reports each stage of the collapse.
The title is the first clue. A process is a procedure, something with steps, and the poem is laid out like one: delight, noticing, catastrophe, blame, verdict, surrender, sleep, reset. Almost every step gets its own stanza, as if each were being ticked off a list. The speaker is not simply swept away by a mood but watches it run its course, which gives the poem its dry, observational tone.
Look at who is present in the sentences. "Feeling great" has no subject, and "Look at that sunshine" is an instruction with no one giving or receiving it. Happiness here is unowned, a fragment that floats by. The first "me" arrives only when the speaker decides the world is against them. The scale of the fear also shrinks as the poem goes on. First the whole world will explode, then "we're all going to die", then the grievance narrows to "The world doesn't want me to be happy." The apocalypse turns out to be personal. The leap from sunshine to explosion is startling, though one might read it as a hidden logic, since the sun is itself an enormous blaze and the brightness that delights the speaker can just as easily threaten them. That is an inference, but the poem's speed invites it.
The hinge is the two-line stanza: "The world doesn't want me to be happy. / That's what I decide." It is the only stanza that runs over two lines, so the poem slows down exactly where the speaker's self-awareness appears. The first line sounds like a fact, and the second quietly withdraws its authority by admitting it is a verdict, something chosen. There is even a faint sound-link between "die" and "decide," so that the earlier panic and the later choice seem to echo each other. The despair is not denied, but it is exposed as something the speaker does.
Ridpath uses almost no ornament. There is no rhyme and there are no extended metaphors, just plain words in the present tense and flat declarative sentences. The flatness produces the comedy. "I give up all hope" contains the biggest abstraction in the poem, and it is followed at once by the smallest action: "I go to bed." Surrender is delivered in the tone of someone switching off a lamp. Long *o* sounds run beneath the whole piece, in "explode," "hope," "go," "tomorrow," like a repeated sigh. The white space between stanzas works as silence, and perhaps as the passing of the night.
The final line is the most interesting. "I can start tomorrow again" comes straight after hope has been abandoned, yet it is hopeful in practice. "Can" suggests possibility rather than certainty, "start" suggests a fresh attempt, and "again" admits that this has happened before and probably will again. Hope is no longer a feeling here but a habit, something sleep restores whether or not the speaker believes in it. Because the poem ends where it could begin, with another morning that might open with "Feeling great," it reads as a loop. Whether that loop is resilience or a treadmill is left open, and the poem is better for not choosing.
The poem is significant because it refuses melodrama. It does not tell us who is speaking or what lies behind the mood, and it does not need to, since the pattern is the subject. Despair is cut down to size without being dismissed, and the humour lets readers recognise their own sudden mood swings without feeling accused. For a poem with so few words, it shows how much can be done by small choices: a pronoun that appears late, a title that sounds clinical, a single verb, "decide," that changes how everything before it is read.