by Sam E. Jones

Created on: November 03, 2010

Writing poetry is like cracking open your soul and spitting out pieces of yourself; it’s like eating yourself alive while hoping for something good to come of it. This is why poetry has therapeutic benefits, because it’s a thing you can do without permission, judgment or the need to please another living soul. Because it’s a way to plumb the depths of your inner self in ways that don’t have to mean anything, but can, and sometimes really do; because it’s you, and yours.

Writing is therapeutic because it’s rhythmic, because it has a certain cadence, a certain tick-tocking of your heart while you keep breathing; because it comes out of you, sometimes in bits and spurts, sometimes spewing, making you feel like too much of your insides might be coming out with it. Because it’s words, and letters and thoughts and ideas and feelings. Especially feelings, because when you write poetry, you feel it, really deeply.

It’s also therapeutic because sometimes, stuff comes out you weren’t expecting, stuff that makes you turn your head a little or frown as you wonder that was all about. Because you can surprise yourself or someone else who you dare let read it. Because poetry builds a bridge between conscience thought and the heart, between reason and impulse, between emotion and actual words. Because when it comes out, there’s nothing there but you on the page. Little bits of you strewn about in structured but haphazard ways. Little bits of your pain, your sorrow or anger. Little bits of flesh torn from that place in your chest that hurts when you see what you’ve done.

Poetry, is therapeutic because it allows you to hold a mirror to your own ego, to record that inner voice that is so familiar to you, but unheard by everyone else. It’s therapeutic because no matter if you or anyone else ever reads what you’ve written, you still know, and you will always know what you meant. Because you know it was the truth.

Writing poetry is revealing, which is really just another word for therapeutic; it’s tantalizing and brash and hard and icy; it’s close, sometimes too close, and sometimes too real, because when you write poetry, all those walls come down, and the doors open and all the locks are broken, you’re there alone clanking around in the inner recesses of your deepest mind.

Writing poetry is therapeutic, because it’s you doing it.

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