Conditions that become sensory worlds

A poetic conditional needs more than two interchangeable endings. Its condition establishes a world in which something can be perceived. Sensory evidence develops into an image, the image undergoes a metaphorical change, and that change earns a consequence. The counterworld should receive the same imaginative attention as the world selected by the test.

AND asks conditions to converge. OR admits more than one route to a result; in Boolean logic it is inclusive unless an exclusive rule is stated. NOT reverses a truth value, but poetic inversion can also expose evidence against a speaker’s denial. ELSE supplies the world the failed test makes available. None of these operators proves an emotional conclusion. A line about forgiveness still has to persuade the reader through its wording.

The example starts from an interrupted elevator. Touch replaces motion: a passenger finds the banister, and an ordinary rail becomes a remembered instruction passed through hands. Its counterworld keeps the machinery working and lets bodily knowledge remain unused. The two worlds have different sensory centers, not merely opposite adjectives.

Stair Walking

If the elevator stops,
the banister gives my palm
an instruction older than electricity.
Otherwise, the seventh floor arrives quick
without asking what my knees might remember.

Making and checking the poem

Declare variables and the condition, then write S, I, T and M before drafting each world. An optional inner IF is evaluated only after the outer IF succeeds.

Try both true and false contexts. Test AND, OR and NOT with parentheses. In this example the true branch is selected. A nested test is different from a sequence of unrelated IF statements; a list of ELSE IF tests selects the first successful branch in the existing Conditional poem mode.