The word is the achievement. Unlanguage names something that had no name: not silence, not miscommunication, but “that aching space / between what is felt / and what is heard.” The definition arrives late, forty lines after the title, and everything before it is evidence that the condition exists.

The count is what gives the poem its weight. “Miss all four hundred / love-laced attempts, / hungry offerings, / multiple published books worth.” That figure is verifiable against the catalog itself, which makes the line reportage rather than hyperbole. A man has written four hundred poems to one person and been filed under brother. The poem’s central question follows directly: how does an intelligent mind miss every signal? It is asked without an answer, and the absence of an answer is the point — unlanguage means the signals were sent and did not arrive as sent.

Fire runs through the piece with unusual discipline. It starts small and domestic: “every carefully placed ember— / of thought,” where each poem is an ember set deliberately. Then “as the room burns,” almost parenthetical. Then the title image, which is the poem’s boldest compression — the burning man is already ash, meaning the event is over before the poem begins. What follows is not immolation but its aftermath: “the smell of burnt paper, / an acrid whisper, / secrets never known, / cremation of a rough draft.” Burnt paper is the correct smell for a poet’s incineration, and calling himself a rough draft is the most brutal self-assessment in the catalog.

The unwriting sequence is the technical high point. “unwriting my existential self / word / by word / letter / by letter / till the page is clean.” Each unit gets its own line, so the reading slows to match the erasure being described, and the sequence moves from word to letter — from meaning to component. A page that is clean is a page with nothing on it, which for a writer is not peace.

“Log out / of soft-lit fiction / I called us” plants contemporary vocabulary in the middle of the ruin, and it lands. Soft-lit is the word doing the work: not false exactly, just flatteringly illuminated.

The ending refuses the resolution it has set up. After the vanishing, after the page is clean, the poem gives four bolded lines: “I / am burning / in a desert // alive.” Still burning, still alive, and then “for …” — a preposition with nothing after it. The sentence cannot be finished, which is what unlanguage means, and the poem stops rather than concludes.

Read beside “Caustic Revelation” from April, the relationship is clear. That poem shouted the same wound; this one has stopped shouting. Devastation here arrives quietly.

The coinage alone justifies the poem. Unlanguage identifies a real thing that ordinary vocabulary handles badly, and the definition David gives it is exact enough to be borrowed. Writers invent words constantly; few of the inventions are needed.

The unwriting passage is the strongest formal writing here, its typography doing exactly what the content describes. “Cremation of a rough draft” is the single best phrase, and the four hundred count grounds the whole complaint in something a reader can check.

Two things hold it back. The middle section indulges its own injury — hungry offerings, multiple published books worth, brother-zoned into a silent corner — and the accumulation of grievance flattens what the fire imagery achieves on either side of it. Stating the tally once would hit harder than stating it with adjectives attached.

And the piece remains visibly a working draft. Transitions arrive abruptly, the ellipsis in the middle marks a gap the poem never bridges, and the closing preposition is either a masterstroke or an unfinished sentence depending on how generous the reader feels. Left raw it has documentary force. Edited it would be a considerably better poem and a less honest document. That trade is real, and it is David’s to make rather than mine.