The wavering, temperate rasp moving in light swirls towards the ruby red tongue, and the crusty saliva, reverberates from her hushed notes, and the sentiments and the tears, and the subjugation, washing her body in sheets of vehemence and shame and savagery. The empty eyes film the fleeting travels of the aggressors as they move through the city, dark blue sky a backdrop of doom; wispy clouds bearing jagged teeth like candyfloss as it rots and decomposes into rotten mould, the leaves puffed from ashy pollution and the canopy of trees, smothered with rusted brown.                                            

 The unwritten letter flies abandoned on the desk, and the neutral images on the walls scream a daydream of thoughts, left to waste as the paper crumples into the metal bin. Words sketched in red beat around the room; and her fingers play a piano of green theatres of trees as the parks outside emerge in a mirage of places and colours, and streaks and white, and blue, and rose. The detached stranger would think to open her lips, tumble forth a melody of poetry and a composition of sounds , and a canvas of art that lingers, lingers; on the edges of her vision.                                                                                  

 It is, oh, so, oh, so, oh, so very sad that her leagues of manuscripts; and her old phone books and her drafts of tangible, painted product churns out her rewards and liberalism; and stripes of hope. It is golden, oh so golden, with its glittering gleam of blue tinfoil paper, and its flashes of azure, and its tones of romantic pink. Hundreds of thousands of white envelopes function as a bed for its sleeping words as the old clock ticks; and the bell rings with mail, singing tunes of debt and graft, and red disapproval. The secluded parks outside form a haze of grazing land; and the isolated roads paint the ground with strips of bronze and cream; and she contemplates how it became so grey, and the papers torn down from the walls: ripped down in a hail of shards, and rainbow-shaded pins, raining down in pinpricks of silver and gilt.

If typewriters were sound, and ink were the moon; and her thoughts a diary of cinema: and her car a hermit of museums , and her hair strands of letters she wondered; wondered, if they would crush her down, to fixed hands of the clock, in the late afternoon.

She paused to think if they would staple her lips and censure her past and apply a delicate wallpaper of paint stripper to her label; and would it always be loitered with foiled bags and a gloomy night sparkling with navigators. It did not matter that the pages were formal and the sky was plain and the address engrained with steel and thoughtlessness. The letters were not touched with a spark of creativity: the bent edges were not inked with roses, and the stamp was not drawn with fading hills; and the walls did not cry back.

It did not matter that the building was held up with mortar and dirt and skeletons, of scaffolding and that the glued tin box, was not burdened with postcards and gifts and parcels. It should not tarnish her name if the stars were not a faultless jewellery shade; and the carpets were not varnished with liquid: and the rain ceasing to coat the windows with streaks of condensation. It should not matter that the door was crumbling and falling in, that the black swings were tethering on the edge of the playground.

If she had these graphite letters clutched in her palm, then it did not matter that baby oil had smoothed across her fingernails and lip gloss had dusted the dry patches of skin, and books had hung, spellbound, on the shelves; and mirth had flooded through the room.

The voice was hers, and it would remain a secret recording of a human being lighting up, with the rise of dawn; and the swans that bob along the blue shore; and the gates that lock that power in forever.