Undone - Sept 29 2026

Undone

Sept 29 2026

The unfinished novel.

The poem that lost its way.

The false starts, on crumpled foolscap

balled-up on the floor.

And the essay

I swear I'll get to soon enough.

A lifetime of good intentions

    . . . and things left undone.

Letters I wish I'd sent,

apologies

that went unsaid,

regrets, I kept to myself.

The love I felt

but never expressed.

Because the time was never right.

Because I feared rejection.

Because I felt unworthy

to even try.

And because it was better to imagine

than let the dream die.

But it did, of course;

she got on with her life

mine stalled.

Like a student who procrastinates

until it's too late

to ask for extra time.

Like the poem

too clever by half

that doesn't have a heart.

And like the novel, in search of an end

that goes off in all directions

until it stammers to a stop.

We regret the things in life we didn’t do more than the bad choices we made and things we actually did.  Because it’s easy to idealize the things we only dream about, while reality is never perfect. The life we didn’t have could always have been better than the one we lived.

Doesn’t every writer have at least 1 unfinished novel mouldering in a desk drawer? Or on a corrupted computer file? (I hasten to say not me:  I have neither a novelistic imagination nor a novelistic life!) And since I hate waste, every false start of a poem gets tortured to a conclusion — no matter how good or bad!

 But aren’t all lives undone? Never fully complete? Never come to a  definitive and satisfying end? I hear of dying people who say they have no regrets. I very much doubt this. Perhaps memory fails. Perhaps they’ve absolved themselves. Or maybe it’s the morphine. I already have lots of them. On my deathbed, they’ll still be there. 

Coming to a stop is not the same as coming to an end. An ending concludes. It reaches its destination, just as a good novel leaves nothing unresolved, no loose threads. While a stop just runs out of gas.