2020: Outro

What one poet learnt from 2020:  Preview DRAFT 1.x

1. It is never too early for an outro.
2. Rain is louder than thoughts, but only in the first four three minutes.
3. Our Your shadow is still stuck to my wall, where it was cast, without care, that last weekend before the first lockdown.
4. At some point, I turned this year into a convenient excuse. Like you did.
5. Probability is inversely proportionate to the length of silence. Words however cannot change the outcome.
6. If so much pain seems senseless, a little little happiness, by extension, is senseless too.
7. Every existential equation is solved in the songs the birds made up when humans emptied the streets.
8. The thing is, phone calls end. Like life. Like time.
9. It doesn’t take that long for “every day felt like a year” to become “a year that felt like a day”. (It takes a day. Or a year.)
10. Isolation is terrifying without a secret preoccupation. (Unless you are secretly preoccupied with the terrors of isolation, in which case the preoccupation is terrifyingly isolating.) (Why secret?)
11. Being a poet during a pandemic is a test of brevity. How best can the endless void, the featureless grey wrapped sky, the road that bends into the horizon, the distance that is measured in everything other than distance — how best can the infinite be compressed into neat lines that in the seventh reading still make some sense.
12. Size has swapped meaning. Big has turned small. Little is too much. Consider. The Universe. One word. Forever. Now.
13. Mostly, just #11.
14. Truly, just #4. But concise is always a verse, thirteen verses too long.