Late December is when people count up what the year gave them, and Barry Cotton's untitled poem, marked only by asterisks, does the same with a bleak result. The first line fixes the moment: "A few days before the new year 2022." That is the poem's own dating, and it sets up a threshold where resolutions and fresh starts are usually expected. What follows is a refusal of that mood. "Not much has changed, I haven't felt anything." The speaker has nothing to report, and the poem is built around that emptiness.
The opening already shows a narrowing. First the speaker hasn't felt anything "FUN," a small and almost casual complaint. Then the sentence widens into something much larger: "I haven't felt anything." The capitals on FUN read like a shrug, or like sarcasm, a loud word for something absent. A few lines later, "NOTHING" sits alone in capitals, with no punctuation and no company. It is the poem's thesis, and it works as an emotional blackout in the middle of the page.
The most striking structure is the list that follows, six lines beginning "No one." The repetition gives the poem its only real rhythm, a drumbeat of negatives. Otherwise the poem has no regular meter and no rhyme, and the opening lines sound like diary prose. The verbs also seem to climb. Being seen, talked to and met are basic social contact. Being heard goes deeper, and being loved and wanted deeper still. The last line of the list, "No one wants me, not even myself," breaks the pattern. The list had been about other people, and then it turns inward. The speaker's own self joins the crowd that has turned away. The grammar slips too, with "No one hear me" and "No one love me" dropping the verb endings. Whether deliberate or not, the effect is of unpolished, unguarded speech, as if the speaker were too tired to correct themselves.
After that accumulation comes an odd little deflation: "Maybe I just grew up a little bit." The tone is almost offhand, and the hedging "maybe" and "a little bit" make it sound like a consoling explanation the speaker half-believes. Growing up is offered as the reason for the numbness, as though losing the ability to feel fun were simply what happens to people. The poem doesn't confirm this, and its next lines suggest it isn't enough.
The final stanza changes shape. "Depressed about death and / Ended up loving someone who didn't exist" has no clear subject, and the two halves don't quite fit together grammatically. That broken syntax suits a mind that isn't in good order. The lone word "Or" on its own line then works as a hesitation, a correction made mid-thought. The speaker offers two possibilities: loving someone who didn't exist, or loving "Someone who didn't know I existed." The two options mirror each other. In both, one person is absent, either the beloved or the speaker's place in the beloved's awareness. This echoes the earlier list, where "No one saw me" now has a specific face behind it. The final word, "again," is the most painful. It turns one loss into a pattern and closes the poem with no resolution or lesson.
What makes the poem worth reading is its lack of decoration. There are no metaphors of winter or darkness, and no attempt to turn the pain into something pretty. The imagery is almost entirely negative, made of things that didn't happen and people who weren't there, and the poem makes absence feel concrete through counting and repetition. The dated opening gives the numbness a context, since the calendar expects renewal and the speaker has none to offer. Readers, especially young ones, may recognise the particular loneliness of feeling unseen while surrounded by an ordinary world. The poem doesn't claim to fix that feeling. It records it honestly, and that is its main strength.