Thursday, July 16, 2015

Lines Enhanced by a Word Suggested by Nick Duffy

For all its innovation and promise, internet mail cannot compete with the old Bromyard PO box system, through which I used to send Stephen Duffy handwritten letters. Losing the address in a house move when I was 18 seemed to signal the end of my childhood. Years later, I found it again, one morning when the sun caught the old dining table in such a way as to reveal the address scratched into the wood. I must have left the impression when zealously pressing my pen on an envelope as a 12-year-old boy. Back then, people I admired received and read my letters, replying sporadically, but now is the age of Facebook's "Other" folder, and I fear that I am interminably "other".

Diabolical horn'ed crown-flanks gash
A dining room table's ballpoint cache
Disinterred by partly expanded
Bellows of sun. The heavy-handed
12-year-old's sub-franked glyphs are defaced;
Other of Other, address misplaced
In a house move, now lost unreprised
And without indemnity realised.