Your Polished Scars Betray the Language in Waste Bins out Back

In the celebration of revision,
Of the care, precision, the ruthless work,

And all the swapped tales of their professor
Poets who swore rewriting brought to life,

Doesn’t anyone, become writer now,
Appreciate how they may have been harmed?

The core trope, of writing as wrestling match
With dragons and angels, of words as hoards

In cursed and booby-trapped underworld tombs,
Where any greedy choice could trip the wire,

Of grave-robbing as archaeology
To display in connoisseurs’ museums,

And then the other, grisly metaphor,
Of each text as a corpse to animate

Via more and more incisions and grafts,
Vicious elisions and stitching of parts,

As if the worth of the entire body
Was only its exposed and hot-wired heart,

What have these fantasies of mastery
Worked in the minds of writer-taught writers?

Submission to the dominant genius
Of the classroom, benevolent tyrant

That is no one actual professor,
Only the notion of a champion

Of the endless massacre of darlings,
Ropes of cicatrice left for lines of text.