Three lines, no scene, no explanation: Jason Ridpath's "Coping With the Pain" drops us into the middle of someone's bad day and never says how they got there. We learn what is being used (cocaine and alcohol), what it is used against ("the pain"), and what it costs to keep up appearances ("sane like everybody else"). We never learn what the pain actually is. That withholding is the poem's method as much as its subject, and it leaves the reader with the speaker's own problem: a hurt that is everywhere in the poem and nowhere defined.
The central idea is the gap between how a person feels and the face they show. The speaker is surviving in two ways at once, numbing themselves and pretending, and the poem suggests neither is working very well.
The first line is a fragment with no subject and no finished verb: "Cocaine and alcohol helping or hindering." The speaker weighs the substances and cannot decide. There is no question mark, though. The line ends on a flat full stop, as if the uncertainty were a fact rather than a question. The h-sounds of "helping or hindering" tip back and forth like a seesaw, and the falling rhythm of those last words (HELP-ing, HIN-dering) lets the line trail away without an answer.
The second line speeds up and loses its punctuation: "I don't care I'm just coping with the pain." Nothing separates "care" from "I'm," so the words tumble out like a shrug mid-sentence. "I don't care" sounds defensive, especially after a first line that shows the speaker does care enough to weigh up the damage. "Just" shrinks the suffering into something minor. Then there is "coping," a respectable word, the sort a counsellor might use, applied here to cocaine and alcohol. Because it is also the title, the irony hangs over the whole poem. "The pain" takes the definite article, as though we should already know which pain is meant.
In the third line, the speaker says "I am sane," not "I'm sane." After the contraction in line two, the fuller form sounds careful and rehearsed, like someone practising a line to deliver convincingly. That is an inference from the wording, but the verbs support it: "Trying to pretend" makes sanity an effort and a performance rather than a state. The poem then ends on "like everybody else," a deliberately plain phrase. The last word is "else," which puts the speaker outside the group they are imitating.
The poem has no regular metre and no rhyme scheme, but it has a pattern of sound. "Cocaine," "pain" and "sane" share the same long vowel and closing n. They fall in different places: the first word of line one, the last word of line two, and the buried key word of line three. The ear catches the echo even when the eye does not, and it chains the drug, the hurt and the sanity together as if they cannot be separated. The rhyme with "pain" is also hidden mid-line, while the line itself ends on "else." Sanity is present but covered over, much as the speaker's state is.
The grammar adds to this. "Helping," "hindering," "coping" and "trying" are all present participles, actions in progress with no ending. The poem has no past tense and no future, and no completed action to offer relief. The lines also lengthen, from five words to nine to ten, as if the speaker starts clipped and then finds it hard to stop talking, though the poem still stops abruptly.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to dress anything up. It does not glamorise drug use, preach against it or ask for pity. It gives the voice of someone who has half-decided not to care. The real injury, though, falls in the last line. The drugs are not the loneliest thing here, pretending is. There is also a paradox in "I don't care." Someone who truly didn't care would not have written the poem down, and putting the truth into words is the opposite of pretending to be fine.