Thank you all, gentlemen, for your continued engagement with the poem and revision.
Glenn, I'm glad you found the meter tighter. Thank you for looking in again and pointing out a few more rough areas. I've made additional adjustments in the latest version to address those specific lines, particularly changing "Five bucks, one cent" to "Five and a cent" to smooth the meter, and tweaking "jerked me awake" to "jerked me wide awake" for better scansion.
Trevor, I'm glad you enjoyed the poem, even if the form didn't work for you. I find your free verse reworking quite interesting. Thank you for taking the time for the reframing. I'd never thought of doing it in free verse, so this helps me see a possible way it could go in that form. I was expressly going for the notion of heightening the tension of the letter with the additional tension of narrative contents versus the tight formal constraints of meter and rhyme. Of course, I have no problem with casting poems, especially narrative poems, into free verse, which I've done before. But I felt this needed a novel treatment, and the form itself is part of the overall effect—without which I find it loses some of its effectiveness for me.
Max, I'm glad you finally got the ending and like it! I found your in-depth elaboration of the time sequence very interesting! This is more so as I'd set out to present it as something that happens in the present, but with flashbacks. So, I get your finding the narrative not quite linear. So, in a way, it did come out as I'd intended, and your timeline analysis shows how much weaving in and out is going on with it. You're right that it will reward multiple readings—which is usually common for non-linear narrative. Still, I'm pleased that even with the few you managed, you were able to mostly string it together.
Thank you all again for your comments and suggestions!
Cheers,
…Alex
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