Revision

What to say about revision?

Revision wakes up day after day and tries to do better

Revision will know where this poem begins - and ends

Revision re-writes to be re-read, says Andre Gide

Revision moves your pen like a Ouija board

Revision turns a pet
into a dog
into a retriever
into a Golden Retriever
into Molly, whose golden coat was so lustrous
that you almost forgot her breath smelled like
the steaks you left to thaw on the counter

Revision is Emmanuel Kant claiming that man
is the only animal that strives for perfectability

Revision wears out pens and makes you reach desperately for
Post-Its and bar napkins all in pursuit of
the most slender sentence
the most on-point clause
the most perfect word

Revision does not replace 'defiantly' with
'definitely': that's editing

Revision brakes and swerves to avoid
a crash on the causeway the same way it
hunts down fallacies in a research paper

And not revising is perilous - it produces
marriages to the same bastard who hit you
before, lifeless classrooms,
forty year old boxers who refuse to
retire, and Danielle Steele

Revision sends you to a place you didn't know
existed, into an abyss to fight the
leviathans inside your own mind

Revision does not apologize because it knows
what comes next is best

Revision pulls soda cans out of garbage cans
to turn that 'fixer-upper' into a
brand new house

Sometimes revision flings your pen
across the room in agony . . . go pick it up . . .
revise some more

Revision sails out of the harbor and into the
horizon with no idea of where it's going and
a two-day ration of corned beef hash

Revision fails like every single one of Thomas Edison's
light bulb experiments, crossing out and trying again
and then the bulb lights

Revision bites the nails of complacency

Revision is your yo-yo diet, the crush whose eye
you cannot catch, the loose tooth you just have to
wiggle, or that spark in a dreamer's eye,
way
way
past midnight

Revision changes the sparkplugs in your car and
the light bulbs in your apartment - unless you
want to not move and sit in darkness

Revision cures boredom, wears a cape,
and fights cancer with a single stroke
o' the pen

Revision breaks your heart because you know
in your heart that your favorite line, like your
old shrunken jeans, just has to go

Revision keeps every single draft and
every single journal entry so when it reflects
it will be amazed by the journey

Revision is a wide-eyed spectacle:
a child's first circus

Revision is writing

Revision is life

Revision is