NEW POEM: Puzzle

S P Clark has written a new poem to coincie with World Mental Health Day 2024. He has written many times about his own mental health, his own battles with addictions an recently about his own journey with therapy. For now, S P Clark brings you Puzzle.

Puzzle

Written to coincide with World Mental Health Day 2024, 10th October

Life feels like it should be a completed puzzle – picture perfect, chocolate-box perfection – all ordered

Instead it often feels as though the box has just been emptied onto the carpet and the pieces are muddled and jumbled – and something is bound to be missing

When I think life is sorted out, a phalanx of coordinated pieces with edges to the left and corners to their places, and sky blue and cloud fragments to the right

The pieces twist and turn, the colour bleeds from the fragments and all becomes a mess of brown, unclear shapes and distortions

I scramble and hurriedly attempt a selvedge to stop my life from unravelling

Usually it works

It often works.

Perhaps I should seek to live the life of an ascetic; finding order to maintain a sense of moral rectitude

Perhaps that would even my mood

I could then pretend that all the pieces of the puzzle were in place as I gloze and flatter the world outside

All in an attempt to hide

To hide the snarling and bursting, the thudding and pounding eructation that issues forth from my brain.

But, no.

The pieces are scattered and one has hidden underneath the sofa never to be seen again

One has been taken from the wrong box and will never quite fit in

The colours have faded, or the paper has peeled meaning the image will never fully be postcard-perfect, a magnet-memento marvel

Perhaps this is okay; perhaps this is just how I function best

Perhaps this is okay today

Entropy reigns.

© S P Clark