EMPTY SET
Vacant name tag, middle of an unwritten;
coaxial o rolls out from its shape:
language unoccupied but
designed by inaudible flashes of colorless.
In the depths of paper, underneath
text; what was before a page blank,
another layer of spotless pulp. Circle
out of its dermus ink: a human bulb, skull light.
Where the substance of thought
enlightens the narrative of bone,
skeleton according to speech;
lack of being alives within empty set.
Like a shape of a sound before
ink forms, before structured print
writhes through and out. Curl brackets
enclose sibilant; an s, a phonetic infection.
But a writer corrects what it hears, forgets
in there where ink absorbs paper, evolves
into written fungic. A spore of alphabet cannot
be sterilized with revision; so one creates
a circumference around the letter
to entrap, to press its outbreak of silence.
Orlando White
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