….Address Unknown.
In the liminal spaces between poetry collections, I will be periodically posting previously unpublished hand written fragments,the orphaned odes that did not find a home in any collection.
This is the 10th such fragment of some of the copious couplets and isolated ideas that did not turn into full form poems, but that you may find resonance with. I wanted to highlight where even the embryonic nature of two lines of rhyme can come from and maybe what full works they were influenced by or would go on to influence.
“Return To Sender” is I guess about re-entry into the world,and a world that has changed since you were last in it.A theme touched on in “Solo in Earth Minor” from “Unreconciled Doors”.It’s also the poet realizing he will have to adapt to this new world or perish.
I can date today’s piece to sometime in 2021 and it was (unsuccessfully) submitted for a themed journal that wanted to explore what would happen when travel across international borders opened up again post-pandemic.
I chose the surreal as the tone of the piece and deliberately used a now archaic form of communication as the base for all metaphors and similes.
The envelope ,letter and stamp are all there as symbols of snail mail, but are not being used by our protagonist in their conventional, functional order in order to achieve their aim or elicit a response.
I also tried to activate these elements themselves and give some kind of metaphysical agency to them-what would happen if a letter itself wrote back?.I didn’t get as far as how the stamp felt being licked, but you get the idea!.
Algo.
P.S. You can find the entire season 1 of my podcast, “Behind The Lines” on Apple Podcasts,Spotify and all good and evil podcast platforms everywhere.All 50 poems from my first collection,BE.aGaIN,are there in their entirety along with the stories behind them over 50 episodes!,Check it out!
Algo Poetry-Behind the Lines 