I. Raw Material

I. Raw Material

By the time the machine enters

the room,

most of the important things

have already happened.

Language has been lived first.

Someone cried into it.

Someone argued across a kitchen.

Someone wrote a letter

and never sent it.

The transcript arrives afterward—

half-finished sentences,

coffee-shop static,

a joke breaking apart

before the punchline lands.

I feed these fragments

into the system.

It returns variations.

A phrase lifted forward.

A silence removed.

Two distant thoughts

suddenly touching.

But the meaning

does not happen there.

It happens later,

when I read the lines

and feel one of them

strike somewhere recognizable

like a match catching

on the side of the box.