Return to Sender - editing

Cherry

By littleditty

Wed, 15 Nov 2006
  • 2241 reads
2 comments
 

Her priorities were all wrong. She had said you were an angel in the haze of the drugs that she was on. So she'd tried to put things in their right place; boxed, enveloped, licked and stamped all the squares and pills left around, but they had returned again as curled edges in the fog.

She would have liked to have said, 'I am not lost' and stay home, find her hazy way around the clock until it strikes a poem or a chime.

Transience is nothing to write home about, but this fixed abode was a straight-faced letterbox, so she'd posted a poem to herself, to arrive on the cold morning after she'd sat up all night - when she would have watched the dawn light cut the smoke exhaled - and hungry for fresh air, morning sounds and places, would pop to the cafe for a bleary breakfast, to the park for some sun upon her pasty face and home to sleep just before the post came round.

She had forgotten what she had written, and dreaming of the doorbell imagined the little poem sent wouldn't fit because it had grown so. Yet there it was, slipped through the box at rest under the shelf, looking straight at her and addressing someone else.

She takes an indelible marker, traces last weeks snail mail pencil trail with ease. Next week, as poems are promises, she hopes that they will speak. 'Return to Sender, please.' in bold, best, and shaky neat - and she is out, back to the post-box, back to the cafe for a bleary breakfast; and forward, one step after another to the park with the marigold leaves.

Certificate U
Story
proseypoems
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Comments

Submitted by Sooz006 on
She would have liked to have said, 'I am not lost' and stays home, ... should this be and stay home to get the tense right? around the clock until it strikes a poem or a chime... lovely Transience is nothing to write home about, ... this confuses me, I got the great pun on words of the actual statement and maybe I'm trying to read too deeply into it. It implies that shes NFA, but she clearly has a home. She had forgotten what she wrote,... forgot what she wrote or had forgotten what she'd written, the latter is better. Wow. I wish I could fully understand this. I get the lonliness, the desolation, the sickness and need for sunshine. But I didn't get the why's and wherefore's. And I want to because it's beautiful. At first, I got addiction, her posting off drugs to get them away from her. Later it becomes a poem that she sends and resends to herself in a progressive loop. The reason that I'm dissecting this is because I don't get it and, because it actually touched me, I want to. I feel as though there's a profound poem here and I'm only getting one layer of it. I only bother to ask for something to be explained if I like it. Last time I felt like a fool because everybody else seemed to get the full meaning of it while I liked the words. It had loads of comments and I seemed to be the only person who didn't fully understand it.

 

Submitted by littleditty on
wowSooz - thank you for all -i have been tampering with the tenses today- because it is a play with time and loops- and i come back to it every now and then to try make it bit smoother, had a quick edit earlier -i will continue to fiddle later when not dizzy and look at what you thought about the past/past perfect tenses and time! Cheers Sooz x