Read all of the poems as they become available here.

I write a lot. I write in a professional capacity. I write in a hobbyist capacity. I write to satiate my own innate desire to process emotions through the sequential ordering of words to contextualize ambiguous and amorphous ideas into more understandable things. There is a power in naming something, in confining something, in externalizing something.

However, what I haven’t done a lot lately is write poems. It’s not like I haven’t written poems, but doing a 30/30 after writing a poem after maybe every few months is very much like going into a marathon without any training. The muscles and instincts aren’t there like they used to be. There’s a lot more tension. A lot more not knowing. Not a lot of gas in the tank, lots of uncertainty in whether or not I’ll be able to complete another day.

But admittedly, that is part of the fun I suppose.

My first week of poems were very much in line with things I would do in the past. Some cutesy tricks, but fairly conventional by the historic record.

My second week of poems immediately started going weird places. Remapping the prisoner’s dilemma, pormanteau-ing supercalifragilisticexpialidocious with ketoacidosis, using brackets as a visual metaphor for bricks, and most recently, awkwardly centering text to evoke the image of a lighthouse. There were some “standard” things, a haiku tossed in there as well, but I have already managed to reach a point where my brain is in this weird state of overdrive, where the question is “why not try this?”

And that’s cool because that’s the point of this exercise. But that’s also scary because I’m not used to having that happen in the first half of a 30/30.

But I suppose that is what happens when you toss yourself back into an arena. And I think the thing that has surprised me the most is how much fun I’m having. I had forgotten what it is was like to have fun. Not that I don’t find my newsletter and myriad of other writing avenues fun, but that unbridled joy of doing something for the purely sake of it and for me and me alone.

Of course, I am not secretly hiding anything, but the allowance of viewing is more incidental than intentional.

I got 3-ish more weeks of this. It’s not gonna be easy, but it’s gonna be fascinating and isn’t that point? To be fascinated?