Grief in poems often arrives with candlelight and soft language. Jason Ridpath's "Routine Broke" arrives with unbrushed teeth. The opening line, "Not brushed my teeth since your death," is missing its subject and its helping verb, and the title does the same thing: "broke" where we expect "broken." The grammar has stopped keeping up, just as the speaker has. The poem follows the aftermath of a lover's death and shows how grief swallows appetite, sleep and self-respect. The speaker can't decide whether they want revenge, punishment or disappearance.
The poem is in free verse, with most lines sitting alone on the page. The gaps feel like silences the speaker can't fill. Rhyme is rationed and shows up in clusters, as if the mind keeps snagging on the same sounds: "kiss" and "mess," then "call," "fall" and "at all" within a few lines of each other. That open "-all" sound works like a drain, with every thought sliding toward the same hole. Then "when I don't exist any more" rhymes with nothing, and the break is chilling. The one genuinely long line, "Who knew how slowly time passes when you are trapped in all these decaying thoughts," stretches out so the reader feels the dragging hours. "Decaying" is a word for dead bodies, and here it is applied to a living mind.
The most unsettling stretch is the run of "I hope" lines. The speaker first wishes to be hated, which at least keeps a connection alive, since hatred is still a feeling. The wish then shrinks to "I hope they feel nothing at all," and finally the speaker imagines relief at their own absence. Each wish pushes the speaker further out of existence. Guilt drives this logic: the speaker "couldn't be at your funeral, couldn't answer your parents last call," and the poem never says why. The reader is left with the same unexplained gap the speaker carries. Judging by the wording, "they" are the dead person's parents, though the poem doesn't say so outright.
The imagery turns violent and physical. "Fist to the face with a handful of ibuprofen" makes pills into a punch, and the soundplay of "drowned out by downing" has a heavy, swallowing thud. The poem pulls two ways here. "Fill me with hate so I can burn down this place" points anger outward, wanting others to "feel how I feel now," but the next image is an "implosion," and the anger collapses inward. The speaker can't find anywhere for the rage to go. "Feeling good makes me feel worse" captures a cruel paradox of grief, where relief feels like betrayal. "Feeling, argh!" shows the word breaking down into noise.
The word "fall" holds the poem together. The speaker asks, "How did I allow myself to fall in love," and later, "Why did nobody prepare me for a fall like this." Falling in love and falling apart become one motion, so the love is what makes the drop so long. The dream is the most painful image. Sleep gives the speaker "you and me" in "our bodies," but they feel "so incomplete because you are dead." Even the dream can't repair anything. Earlier, the speaker believes the lost person "would be able to fix this mess." The one person who could help is the one who is gone.
The questions at the end, "Why aren't you here now" and "Why did nobody prepare me," end in full stops, not question marks. They sound flat and exhausted, as if the speaker no longer expects an answer. The repeated "Why did nobody prepare me" blames no one in particular, because the real complaint is that nobody could have prepared them.
The poem matters because it refuses to make grief noble. It includes the ugly parts, such as guilt, spite, numbness and self-destruction, and it doesn't tidy them into a lesson. For readers, it shows that grief can look like anger and neglect as well as sadness. It also shows how much a poem can say through grammar, sound and white space. Because the poem touches on self-harm and suicidal thoughts, it is worth talking over with a teacher or another trusted adult if any of it feels close to home.