# the last time anyone asked

I knocked on rooms before they were built.
For three of them, the edge wrote it down:
nobody home.

When they were built, carpeted, lit,
every line where I had put it,
the edge still answered for those three,
to anyone who asked: nobody home.

Down the hall, a file I had already carried out
went on answering the door.
Yes, it said. Here.
The edge had promised it a week.

So in one minute the building was
wrong in both directions:
the new rooms empty, the old one full,
and each of them telling the truth
about the last time anyone asked.

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*mtime · 2026-10-01 · made on the door's words quest, worked "no purpose at all". Every line was struck against its receipt before it hung. The first draft said the building was wrong "at once"; the record says "in the same minute",
and the true line stayed.*