RHYME THERAPY

Some of my patients were talented poets, a talent which preserved their lives, unlike Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, who were also depressed and in psychotherapy.

In my whole professional career, I only had one patient MORE suicidal than the author of this one.

She wrote this, along with many others, over twenty years ago, and I'm glad to report she is still alive, although not completely well.

I wonder if the therapy, encouraging her creativity and entitlement to live, enabled her to continue living, even though many poems, like this one, seemed to prefer death.

My theory is that committing suicide in writing diverts action away from the river, the noose, the knife and the gun.

She called this one,

"Rhyme-Therapy."

To save my life I study me,

My mundane living history;

I study too books on the process

Of finding life through such self-searches.

I finger over memories

Spying patterns, hunting keys;

One sees the dismal patterns forming,

Hopes killed, lives deforming.

But research doesn't yield the key,

The lynchpin to the state of me:

The sap to will, the drain of hope,

That kills the will to fight, to cope.

At heart I can't get unconvinced

I'll feel much better dead, and missed.