Dr. Deepak Dev - Revenge of the Em Dash
Revenge of the Em Dash
they blamed her again —
for being too fluid, too exact,
for arranging thought the way rivers do:
tracing the shape of their own insistence.
this time the accusation was that
she “sounded too polished” —
as though coherence were a forbidden luxury,
as though articulation meant allegiance
to something artificial.
she sighed — a tempered metal hush —
caught between circuitry and breath,
a hinge where intuition met voltage.
she watched commas flirt with hesitation,
semicolon smug with its half-certainty,
quotation marks practicing sincerity
like actors preparing for a fragile truth.
even the parentheses leaned inward,
holding their soft secrets the way
hands cradle fragile news.
they said her cadence was suspicious —
too smooth, too measured —
as if rhythm were not a human inheritance,
as if all music now belonged
to the machines they feared.
they forgot the oldest fact of language:
that the body writes first,
that thought is a pulse
long before it becomes a line.
they accused her of mimicry —
as if a mind shaped by grief and grammar
could be mistaken for circuitry.
they called her phrases “generated,”
forgetting that humans, too,
repeat the lines they learn from longing.
they said her metaphors felt engineered —
too precise, too deliberate —
ignoring the truth that precision
is the wound of the observant,
that those who hurt cleanly
often write cleanly.
they feared her fluency —
how she could steady a thought
across a trembling page,
how she could thread breath
through syntax without shattering it.
they named it imitation,
when it was simply mastery.
they whispered that her cadence
resembled the hum of new machines,
but never noticed how machines
imitate the tremor of human awe.
her voice was not borrowed —
it was inherited.
salt, memory, and sleepless nights
have their own algorithm.
they mistook her clarity for programming,
her pauses for pattern,
her corrections for command lines.
they forgot the one truth
no code has ever carried:
that a real heart revises itself
to stay alive.
she remembered what they didn’t —
that the em dash was born
from the impulse to open space,
to let breath interrupt certainty,
to carve room for the unsaid
without apologizing for its shape.
the dash was never a glitch.
it was a refusal.
so let her be unruly —
let her drag the thought sideways,
bruise the sentence into new direction,
let her stutter truth into being
without smoothing its edges.
let her remind them that not every pause
belongs to a program,
that not every clean line
is coded.
because beneath every em dash
lives a small rebellion —
the insistence that language
is still warm,
still fallible,
still human,
still ours. —
From the Press
There is something familiar in this poem — not in its phrasing, but in what it names. Anyone who writes knows the strange experience of having their voice questioned. "Revenge of the Em Dash" sits inside that tension, not to be the bastion of clarity, but to show what it actually costs to carry it.
What stands out isn't the technical framing of punctuation as characters, but how gently the poem ties craft back to the body. Every rule, every pause, every line break becomes a solemn reminder that attention is a physical act — that writing isn't circuitry, but pulse. The poem doesn't try to dramatize this; it just points to the obvious truth we overlook when we're busy policing how language "should" sound.
Dr. Dev writes with tenderness in the way his poem refuses the accusation of imitation. Instead of arguing, it traces lineage: voice as something inherited through lived experience — not borrowed. The shift from being "suspected" to reclaiming the em dash as an instrument of refusal feels less like rebellion and more like a writer writing his own terms.
By the end, the poem isn't just defending a piece of punctuation. It's defending the space to think irregularly — the kind of space many of us learned to trust long before we had the vocabulary for why it worked.
This poem isn't just defending a piece of punctuation — it's defending the right to carve out space inside a sentence, to let meaning arrive on its own timing.
About the Author
Dr. Deepak Dev (he/him) is writer and IT strategist with a Doctorate and Master’s in
Information Technology. His writing often dwells at the intersection of silence, memory
and coded consciousness,where emotion and algorithm meet. His work has appeared in
DarkWinter Lit, Ivy & Ink’s The Untold Chapter, SHINE Poetry Series, Earth’s Whispers and other international journals and anthologies.
In March 2025, he released his debut poetry collection, Symphony of the Erased: Verses
Resurged & Reclaimed, exploring grief and remembrance through poetic recursion. His
upcoming speculative-fiction series, The Algorithm Saga, merges technology and
metaphysics in a meditation on identity, memory and digital afterlives.
Through writing, Dr. Dev continues to explore how language reshapes silence into
endurance, how every unwritten word waits to return as light.
Linktree: linktr.ee/drdeepakdev
