It's the end of writing poems and I feel fine.

Not the end of the world as I know it.

So I finished my Extinction Songs on the morning of New Year’s Eve, with the Beydaglari Bush-cricket. This benighted creature was selected for me as the last poem of the hundred-and-one by randomsequencer.dot.org, the programme I use to, well, randomly sequence things.

I was pretty impressed by it selecting the one cricket on the list for the final spot. What are the odds? So the sequence ends with that relentless sawing noise filling the desert air, at last no human sound to be heard.

Suddenly this choice didn’t seem random at all, and I began to notice what other elements of the project felt more fated than sprung by chance.

That end-of-year deadline I set myself had seemed arbitrary, a writer’s self-pressurising for results after a quiet time with my own verse, yet, looking back, of course I was creating conditions of time running out, winter coming, darkness closing in. I didn’t create - or expect - the horror of the breaking news from America in November, but my creatures had to respond to it, as we all will have to, to save our souls, let alone save the world.

And there was one last metaphorical mechanism about to grind into action…

That the end meant the end.

Because I suddenly feel like I’m done with writing poems.