I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
& as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you’d written
your voice released into the night
like a song, & the mice
grew wilder.
Bag Of Mice
Analysis, meaning and summary of Nick Flynn's poem Bag Of Mice
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It is just a perfect example of an unfulfilled reality. Only in dreams the character is able to imagine how sweeter life is could be when you raise your own children, which in this poem was represented by the three mice. It is not clear though if the husband or the wife referred to in a suicide note is in fact dead for real, because either one of them could be the voice who was trying to awaken the other, or the one who is dreaming.