This reflection on practice paper explores the role of form and playfulness in the serious business of poetic narrative to create stories we can access and understand, in order to recoup and recuperate after times of hardship and change. It is a process of cutting fear and anxiety down to size. In the process of constructing this essay, the strictures of the poetic forms of the sonnet, villanelle and tanka are conflated with the restrictive, confining walls of the home during the COVID-19 pandemic. And the transgressive nature of change in the way we live during confinement within the lock-downs is interrogated through the playfulness, irony and wry resignation of content located within the confines of the predetermined formality of the sonnet, villanelle and tanka.