to all that you are, from all that you made me

Thank you.

I should sign off here. With best, perhaps. Or regards. Or maybe an indication of fondness.

Thank you.

Sincerely.

Brevity be the soul of wit. Or,

Skid marks

... with an afterthought.

Mass-produced. Untethered. Echoless. Shadowless. Baseless.

Blaaaaah.

Monosyllabic grunts scribbled inside an enormity.

A foraging snub farting levity.

An eight-lettered-etch unable to touch the sides.

Crumpable. Disposable. Feel free to walk on by.

No.

This thank you is made from girders.

From "Dos" and "Dares."

It travels along a barrel,

dry to blind-eye stares.

Its pussy-foots are washed away,

lost to granular sands.

It strides into insecurity,

steady in foreign lands.

It has removed its armour,

and its nervy clatter,

put its heart outside its chest

to be shot by all that matter.

It shimmies into obscure whims,

whistling at their wake.

A winning hand?

Not sure today, but the risk it's going to take.

It no longer breathes out drizzles

of apologetic insipidity.

It stands tall in every weather

raw with sensibility.

This thank you could embrace the circumference of the earth;

for within it is the length and breadth of my entire self-worth.

Let brevity go jump. Let Superlatives abound.

Because you chiselled away my self-doubt

... and there my whole you found.

***

Author's note:

Thank You's are a ubiquitous part of civilised life. Two simple words, two syllables, occasionally hyphenated that float around us all like white noise. Barely perceptible most of the time, merely existing as the correct way to close a human-to-human transaction.

I have often wondered if our obsession with schooling and engaging in such manners adds or detracts from the sincerity originally attached to the words. Does their perfunctory use outweigh the meaning? Have thank yous become the cardboard packaging around our communicative lives?

As the "thank you note" is a stalwart of the traditional epistle, I wanted to experiment with the poetic epistolary and try and imbibe as much emotion as I could into it to see what I found when this happened.

What I found was that in order for it to work, the transactional human exchange had to have emotional equity. To be in receipt of a rapturous thank you, a thank you that truly touches the sides of our psyche, we have to have gifted something that deserves it, like helping a person excavate their self-worth. Anything less and this emotional and gushing epistle would not work. It would feel comical, perhaps even absurd.

Thank you for reading, sincerely.