Writing a poem about a bad day won’t fix it. It gives the day a shape you can hold.

A bad day is shapeless, which is part of what makes it heavy. Putting it into lines does not undo anything that happened, and it does give the thing edges, a beginning and an end you chose. Once it has a form you can look at it instead of being inside it. That is a smaller claim than healing and it is real.

Write ten lines about today, badly, with no intention of showing anyone. Read them back in a week and notice that the day has a size now.