Poem

A late-night debugging poem about syntax, uncertainty, and the relief of finding the missing bracket.

As the dark city falls asleep,
A tangled web of syntax sits on my screen,
Issues lying in logic far deep,
A new hope strikes my system. I sense a character astray,
A parasite within the program,
One rogue line that lay,
Hidden in a sea of code. The cursor blinks,
My mind races for an answer,
My heavy heart begins to sink,
Until the missing bracket comes into view.

Reflection

I chose to write this poem in an ABAC rhyme scheme, as it leaves each stanza open-ended with a sense of mystery and uncertainty. I made it so that every 4th sentence was also different from the theme of the rest of the stanza, to blend into the next one, while also continuing with the theme of uncertainty. I tried to convey a sort of “fight” with the machine in this poem by adding phrases like “parasite” and “sea of code”. I also used a lot of my real experience to write this poem, as I often find myself coding for long periods of time at night, and when I run into errors, it really does feel like a fight with the computer. When writing this poem, I had trouble finding good words that rhyme with existing words, like “lay” and “deep”, so I used Merriam-Webster to assist me in finding those words. I did a similar thing in finding descriptive words to use in many parts of the poem, too.