By the time this month ends, I will have written 30 poems in 30 days, and you’ll be able to read them here.

I am not happy with all of the poems. But I am happy with several of them. I’m happy that I set out to do this thing again and I’m happy to have found both joy and catharsis, because apparently I have been lacking both.

It got weird quick. I ended up playing with punctuation, specifically the brackets, a lot more than I intended or really thought of. I played with space and presentation and intersecting meaning, and what it means to be a writer in a world that seemingly doesn’t value writing like it once did, or rather the actual work required to be a writer.

It’s not the destination, it’s the journey. The end result is incidental to the choices that were being made.

I started this month with a singular idea.

From 1/30 - “Let my work be honest. Let my work be mine.”

And I think that is the through line. The central thing I was grappling with in all the myriad of ways.

Some of the stuff I produced was very 2014 Mikkel coded. Some of the stuff could have only written by this version of me. And that’s the point right? To recognize that you all both the past and present? To find something buried and build something new?

The last stretch of my 30/30 will be written in California. Appropriately, after April concludes, I will be meeting up with my old poetry coach and I will be able to share my not-exactly-triumphant return to the genre, and that wasn’t plan, but I do like the narrative appropriateness of it all.

This was hard. This was hard and silly, and there are some pieces that will be stripped for parts and some pieces that will be Ship of Theseus’ed into something else entirely, their origins only known to me.

And they might only exist in fragile hard drives, impermanent things, but at least they existed.

And maybe that’s enough.

When May returns, who knows what I will be spurred on to pen, all I know is that I will pen something because that is ultimately what I do best and I am thankful for that resolve, even if it has been shaken as of late.

Thanks for joining me on this excursion. We’ll see what happens when we cycle back around in 2027.