“We are all poets to our lives in a general sense, but we each have a form that feels comfortable and right.”


Writing feels comfortable to me, when I write I am totally absorbed. Time disappears or stands still. I feel happy messing around with words. We use words every day. The English language is constantly evolving and yet sometimes words are inadequate and meaning is found in the silence around the words.


Today there is a special field called poetry therapy based on the recognition that words carefully chosen words, can be healing, cathartic. Words create images that can clarify emotions, memories and events. We can connect the past, the present with the future; it helps you to understand what you are going through. Poetic language, more so than medical or psychological language requires expression of feeling that is deep and genuine. It can make the human experience and suffering livable, no cure or explanation is necessary. The process is part of the healing., with insights and self discovery.


"Good art makes its way to the soul and does its job of healing”



















Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The Lament of the Fag Ash Lil’

© Copyright Elizabeth Routledge 2010.

There’s a couple of fag ash lil’s
holdin’ up the bar of a Friday night
suckin’ in a lungful of poison
yellowing teeth, yellowing digits
puckered lips like a clenched bum hole
exhaling nicotine yarns through crêpy lungs
boozy lunch confessions
sozzle’d sweat,fuesty breath
preserving things, long dead.
Not buried
as yet.

When youth is gone
desire muddled
thoughts tangled
rose colored memories
tinted with sentimentality
blurry with wishful-ness
recycled histrionics littered
with corpses draped
with imaginary B grade filters
or enhanced, for a laugh
down the well worn path
of a much told tale…
I could’ve been…
I was gonna…
One day…

Through the haze of smoke, and mirrors
life eludes, addictions ensue
take root, like lantana
a host of choking weeds
contaminate any blueprint divine
stifling miracles of DNA
and large sections of the brain remain
dormant and our souls
sing the blues.

Wistful sighs, plaintive cries
escape their lips like a wheeling bird
a furious gull, who thinks
I should‘ve been a swallow
but all I feel is hollow
the seeds of my potential
fall on the fallow, stony ground
of the human condition.

Briefly the sound of sorrow
a fragment of soul hangs in the air
wafts it’s way into the branches of a nearby tree
comforted by cool leaves, rising still further
to join a host of unspoken wails
hanging homeless over the earth
to revisit you on a windy day.
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