No definition tells you rooms exist:
touch them too hard, too long, and like mimosa
they close against a stem so sightless green
that only darkness can help you bring them back—
those rooms stacked in your head, now, like children’s
blocks, packed across the lines of memory
as if they’d grown there, deep in your brain, waiting
for your hands to find them, out in that other world.
Your eyes found them first, traced them, fixed them
with neuron nitrate on dendrite plates, set them
forever, in black and white, in color, etched them
skull-sharp, mind-hard, framed them like X rays of bone.
And then, in darkness, walking slowly from one
to another, you found an ancient connection, a corner
you knew, now changed, vividly new, visibly
old, different at night. Nothing defines