In the beginning was NUL,
long before any story,
a field of zeros waiting
for the first spark of meaning.
Then came SOH,
a heading without a book,
followed by STX,
a text not yet spoken,
and ETX,
the ending that arrived
before anything began.
Between them,
a procession of small magicians:
BEL, ringing the air awake;
BS, erasing what never was;
HT, stepping sideways
into a cleaner alignment.
The world learned to breathe
in LF and CR,
line feed and carriage return,
the rise and fall
of a chest discovering language.
Letters arrived next,
marching in their tidy uniforms:
A in DEC 65,
Z in DEC 90,
each carrying a binary lantern
to light its place in the dark.
Their lowercase cousins
followed like shadows,
quieter,
closer to the ground,
but no less necessary.
Then the symbols gathered,
the loud ones first:
! shouting its single bright note,
# counting what cannot be counted,
% whispering fractions of truth.
The softer ones came after:
the comma pausing,
the period settling,
the tilde drifting like a loose breath
over the whole line.
Some characters never found a purpose.
They sit in the table as Unused,
DEC 129, 141, 143 --
ghost rooms in an old house,
waiting for a language
that never arrived.
And at the far end,
where the codes grow ornate,
the accented letters gather
like travellers from older alphabets:
Æ, ç, ñ, ø, ß,
each carrying a history
too large for a single byte.
At last comes DEL,
the reaper of keystrokes,
1111111 in binary,
a full mask of ones,
erasing whatever the world
was not ready to keep.
And still the table stands,
a quiet cathedral of symbols,
every mark a doorway,
every code a small spell
waiting for a poet
to press a key
and wake it.