A Good Editor - Nov 1 2025

 

A Good Editor

Nov 1 2025

The hard part is taking away.

Subtraction

does not sit well

with our possessive souls.

Every precious word

that gets guillotined

joins a basket of severed heads;

it’s like killing your children

and the young go first.

Because you fall in love

with how a word strikes the ear,

rolls off the tongue,

and says what it says 

exactly as intended. 

Either so precise 

it’s as tightly condensed as an electron beam,

or so deliciously ambiguous

it’s like a pea-soup fog,

diffusing the light 

and obscuring its source.

I’m my own worst editor.

I am prolix, redundant, verbose,

a walking thesaurus

of indecision. 

The only word missing

is short.

Less is more, I know.

But the logic fails me.

Does it imply, taken to extremes

that nothing could be everything?

Just as the universe

before the Big Bang

was null and void,

not just an empty vessel

but no vessel at all.

Forget God’s omniscient hand,

it’s genesis

by means of ballistics

in an instantaneous flash.

The original editor,

whittling down and down

until, to her surprise

space expanded at the speed of light

and an epic poem

begat itself,

an endless ode

would drone numbingly on.

Except, it turns out

the universe, as we know it

on 21st century earth

 — where Man’s in charge,

and his fine point pen 

is a weapon of war —

is more doggerel, than epic,

more pulp fiction

than lyric ode.

A Byzantine noir

I suspect will not end well.

Not for the detective

or femme fatale.

And not the writer,

whose purple prose

could have used a good editor

with a sharp red pencil 

and gimlet eye.

I’ve mentioned repeatedly about my poems being too long (I see eyes glazing over and TikTok videos beckoning) and being in need of a good editor. Which means objective and authoritative, red pen at the ready. So I thought I’d write about it. 

Instructive, the turn it takes (of my state of mind, if nothing else!)