The Price of Success
One day you finally knew how many people you sacrificed to achieve where you are now,you thought that being at the top would bring you more friends and make your family respect you. But in reality every friend who supported you throughout has left and your family want nothing to do with you, now you know how much you’ve given up just to be at the top. You are in your office feeling sorry for yourself, finally you realize how everyone else felt. When this crazed obsession started. When you stop feeling sorry for yourself you decided there is only one way to end this now as you stand at the edge of the top your final thoughts before you jump are how much you regret hurting everyone and the past decisions that lead to this.
By John Davis
Really nice to see a prose poem, and the shape this one is really working well on the page to help communicate the difficult message at the poem’s heart. You manage to encapsulate a big story of ambition, ruthlessness and regret into very few words and the effect is very powerful. The ‘you’ address also brings us very much into the world of the poem, allowing us to feel like we’re witnesses, alongside the speaker in the poem, to the events unfolding here. In terms of suggestions, I think if you wanted to expand this, you could maybe add some details of the office in which the person finds themselves alone and isolated. What objects are on their desk? What do they reveal about the person about to jump? Really striking work!