Somebody is scrambling through tunnels and pipes, frightened, freezing and short of breath, and Brian Routh makes us feel that panic well before he lets us work out the situation, if he lets us at all. "Routes" gives no place, date or name for the speaker's predicament. The "bombed out buildings" in the fourth stanza hint at war, but that is an inference. What the poem actually offers is a body under pressure and one overriding wish: to get out.
The opening is deliberately slippery. "Exacting as it is / it takes the route to end all routes" echoes the old phrase "the war to end all wars," which gives the journey an apocalyptic weight, yet "it" has no antecedent. We never learn what is exacting. The next lines tumble out as questions with no question marks: "which did I hear before the dawn broke / did I get to it / did it collar me fast". Who is chasing whom? "Collar" suggests being seized like a suspect, so the speaker could be hunter or hunted. With no punctuation, one thought runs into the next, the way it does when you are too scared to finish a sentence. Even the pause in "I see and stop and pause to breathe and wipe my brow" is stacked with "and"s, a rest that never quite calms anyone.
The second stanza drops from dread to the body. "I dream of eternal sucking and blowing" reduces breathing to something mechanical, like a pump or bellows. Then comes "I whiz with barely time to wipe my ass." "Whiz" means both rushing and urinating, and the crudeness is the point: fear leaves no room for dignity. The line also answers "wipe my brow" from stanza one. It is the same gesture, now at the other end of the body and robbed of any nobility. The lines shorten into a stop-start scramble ("hanging onto pipes / here and there / getting my bearings"), and the poem's only question mark arrives at the end of it: "which tunnel takes me where?" It is telling that the one properly punctuated question is a practical one.
The third stanza is an inventory, each item opening with "my": eyes, glasses, arms and legs, heart. The details pull against each other. The eyes are "red and watery" but the glasses are "frosted with ice," so the speaker is blurred by fear and by cold at once. Then the senses shift to sound: "loud sounds / my heart the loudest." The superlative turns the poem inward, and the speaker's own pulse drowns out whatever is happening outside.
"Visual oasis" is the poem's strangest phrase. An oasis promises water in a desert, but what the eyes find is "bombed out buildings burn't black." Seeing anything after the dark of the tunnels counts as relief, even ruins. The heavy b-sounds make the line thud, and the odd spelling "burn't" keeps the voice spoken and rough. Then the colour finally arrives, "the blue sky," only to be held back: it is "on the other side of the wall." Beauty is in view but out of reach.
The poem ends on five single words: "outlet / inlet / hatch / exit / escape." The first two are plumbing terms and mirror images, and a pipe can run either way, so even direction stays uncertain. "Hatch" and "exit" are doors. "Escape" is the only word that carries feeling, and it comes last. There is no full stop and no confirmation that anyone gets out. The vocabulary of the machine slowly becomes the vocabulary of hope, and the title's plural, "Routes," starts to read like a list of options.
Part of the poem's force comes from its shape. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes from line length, which starts long and breathless and ends in single words, as if the poem were squeezing down a narrowing tunnel. Routh withholds context, pairs the crude with the high-stakes and refuses any heroic gloss. What is left is fear stripped to sensation, which is why the poem can be read as a war scene or as any moment of feeling trapped.