Red Pencil Mercy

Red pencil came down on the clause—
Correcting the language because
The meaning seemed wrong,
The syntax too strong,
Till the clause became just because.

A clause got corrected so much,
That words moved about at her touch.
The edits grew long,
Each sentence went wrong,
Till the whole thing was written in Dutch.

She edited a precondition—
Till the logic was twisted in fission.
The clause and its reverse
Both true (or much worse),
And nothing solved the contrition.

She marked her own number with red—
And had to be re-registered dead.
The mercy had failed,
Her filing derailed,
When she edited her own op-ed.

The corrections grew far and grew wide,
Till the margins were swallowing side.
Her pencil kept marking,
Kept pointing, kept narking,
Till nothing but corrections applied.

She signed off on edits with care—
Then crossed out her signature there.
The filing was done,
The mercy had won,
But nothing remained but the air.

Each precondition she’d test
Would fail her conditional best.
She’d mark it with red,
Till the meaning was dead,
And the clause was no longer blessed.

The pencil of mercy so sharp
Corrects every clause, every harp.
It marks and it scores,
Till meaning just pours
Away from the system’s whole map.

There once was a clause marked “amend,”
That referenced itself to the end.
Each edit it made
Rewrote the cascade,
Till nothing remained to defend.

She queried the state of a file,
Which answered in absence a while.
The index was there,
But nothing would share—
It had not been named in the pile.

The registrar searched for her thread,
But listed the process as dead.
Still windows remained,
Soft focus, unstained—
As if she’d unregistered instead.

She drafted a message with care,
In StyledEdit, perfectly spare.
No volume was set,
No path, and yet—
It lingered as if it were there.

She launched an update long delayed,
On systems no longer maintained.
It checked every part,
Then quietly shut—
No changes were ever explained.

Her mood was assigned as a field,
An attribute quietly sealed.
But queries would show
No value below—
The index refused to yield.

The node monitor pinged in the night,
Reporting a change out of sight.
No mount could be found,
No directory bound—
Yet something had shifted its state.

She edited “if” into “when,”
Then circled and crossed it again.
The condition collapsed,
All outcomes elapsed—
No branch could be followed just then.

There once was a clause she refined,
Till meaning fell slightly behind.
She marked it in red,
Then marked it—
ERROR: LINE TERMINATED BEFORE RESOLVE