It Can’t Be Helped | Poetry Breakdown

Hello everyone,

It seems like April showers came early this year. Hope you’re staying dry!

It Can’t Be Helped

I’ve been having so much anxiety lately.
Blood-thirsty craving for a stop,
instead of just pushing through.
I’m a student and I’m not allowed to stop.
If I do, then I’ll fail, causing a larger pause within itself.

Fill me up with medications.
Give me all the holistic remedies.
Lay your hands on me.
Hold me tight and promise to never leave.
Everything eventually fades,
it just can’t be helped.

Spill out onto words,
carry around lists and lists of half-dreams,
incomplete-dreams.
Let the world see your struggles
boldly and truly,
but you’re just a pile of words
constructed together to match and make sense.

Listen to my rhetoric,
feel my moist cheeks.
Understand the word choice,
feel my rapid heart rate.
Hear the rhythm, the steady counting,
feel my non-linear thoughts.

I suffer from your problems
and mine as well.
I carry them on my back, secured with a zip tie.
With each step I take,
I crumble further into the ground.
It can’t be helped.
If I fail, a larger pause will carve a deeper hole.
It can’t be helped.

It’s tough being a student. More or less, things are tough. This poem is about a small push towards hope and perseverance. Usually these more hopeful poems are more dramatic with an introduction of deep failure and then rising up to soar in the skies. There’s nothing wrong with those poems. Sometimes they can be a little unrealistic especially if each day is difficult for you, you might as well celebrate the small things. Good job you got out of bed! Congrats you brushed your teeth! That’s amazing, you went outside! From there, you’d have the courage to do larger things. 🙂

There are a bunch of layers and voices in this poem. I like to look at it like they’re all stacked on top of each other until it fizzles out into, “It can’t be helped.” When you’re hurting there’s always a need to find remedy whether from ingesting something into your body or helping others. This poems mostly focuses on writing with emphasis on releasing the piece and the styles in the piece and how it relates with the overall emotion of the narrator.

In my case, I write to help myself control my emotions, but sometimes when I publish my work, I get a little self-conscious or even the opposite, left out in the open. I learn to deal with my own critic, but I’m an artist, so my work is never good enough especially if it’s a dumping of my emotion.

Anyways, keep pushing through.

Thanks for reading!

Alice