Cul-de-sac

[Magpie]

Cul-de-sac—
An inquisitive O.A.P. in a slowly
shuffling serpentine post office
queue on a rainy giro day in summer 
who states, "It was warmer at Christmas?"
                                  —Cul de Sac




Note:
O.A.P. is an Old Age Pensioner/ Senior Citizen.
Giro is informal for unemployment benefit/social security payment that used to be a cheque that had to be cashed at the post office fortnightly.

[ellajam]

Cul-de-sac -
An inquisitive O.A.P. in a slowly
shuffling serpentine post office
queue on a rainy giro day in summer 
who states, "It was warmer at Christmas?"
                                  - Cul de Sac

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
This may be a bit 'too' British to work here -
O.A.P. is an Old Age Pensioner/ Senior Citizen.
Giro is informal for unemployment benefit/social security payment that used to be a cheque that had to be cashed at the post office fortnightly.
And the footnote is longer than the bloody poem.

Just a note on the footnote, I need more time with the poem. I googled as I read before I ever got to the note, seems easy enough to do when reading on the net. I love reading poems studded with slang from other areas.

[Erthona]

A nice snapshot type poem. Personally I appreciate the notes, without them I probably would have just bypassed the poem as not being worth the trouble to look up everything I needed to to make it understandable. I especially would not have known what to do with the " a rainy giro day" phrase. So for me the notes were helpful.

There is cleverness in bracketing the poem with the word "Cul de Sac" although I would use an em dash, rather than a hyphen, to make the parenthetical more clear and make the idea of why more clear.

In terms of the notes (and this half professional and half personal) I would leave a paragraphs worth of white space without a horizontal rule, and start the note section like so:

Note:
O.A.P. is an Old Age Pensioner/ Senior Citizen.
Giro is informal for unemployment benefit/social security payment that used to be a cheque that had to be cashed at the post office fortnightly.

As this part is not a poem, it should be written out in sentence form. Up to you to leave the humor in or not. I tend to think it distracts from and diminishes the poem, however I am often guilty of the same thing

dale

[Magpie]

Thanks Dale,
that was excellent advice regarding the footnote, it just looks so much neater and less distracting. I think that the humour part of the note was a kind of apology to the reader for it not being a straight forward read.
I have included the em dashes as suggested also. It actually made me realise that I have no em dash on my keyboard so I copy and pasted from wiki, I will make more use of the em dash in the future now I know it exists.
I feared a bit for this poem because I realised it was very 'British', so I'm pleased to know that there was a way to make it work and understood.

Thanks for the advice, much appreciated.

Mark