I wrote this last week and, true to my current form, I didn’t finish it and didn’t post it. I thought I would share it now because I think it is worth sharing even in this form. It’s reactive and petulant and unfinished, but sometimes so am I and so are you, so here it is.

I turned 27 this month and it hasn’t answered any questions. It’s almost as if everything is the same.

In the last week of 2021, I wrote a poem called “Turning 27 and feeling lost.” which did not have a clear message, did not come from or actively produce a feeling of resolution or clarity in me following a period of confusion or hurt. I wrote it up nicely like it was finished, but on a few different days since (including today), on walks along the river, I spoke extra lines into my phone, added or reworked or threw away bits in my mind. A redraft I will get to eventually.

This is a new step for me. With my poems, I tend to just go for it. Very few rewrites. It comes out fully formed or it doesn’t come out at all. I think things being different with this poem is a reflection of my current malaise. I’m not really sure of anything, except that I feel lonely a lot and that my defenses are best kept as high as possible. I have regularly broken my instincts on these defenses in the last month in an effort to make them obsolete, but I have rarely been left grateful that I took the leap of faith.

“Turning 27 and feeling lost” originally blossomed from imagery and lines from one I wrote over a year ago which was much neater and with which I have felt consistently satisfied. I feel I have less of a reason to be angry now than I did when I wrote that earlier poem which I have now torn apart and made into something uglier. I was going to say it is at least more real now, but I don’t think that is the case either. At the time of writing this sentence right here, I am feeling angry, dissatisfied, sold short. That will eventually be some of the poem but not all of it. What I have so far has very little anger, it is more like sadness and resignation threaded around a genuine sense of pleasure, of joy, in being flippant, being sarcastic, about experiences which have caused me pain.

I suppose that is how I know it isn’t finished after all. One of the things I have been reminded of over and over recently is that existence is a patchwork of feelings. Sometimes I am full of joy and sometimes full of misery or anger or fear.