The perfect text
‘How much better it would read,’ you say,
‘without that word. The whole phrase, in fact,
is suspect.’ Your finger pokes at excess.
A thin red line marks your scalpel’s track.
And so you sit happily at work in your high
small room, a view of mangroves at your back,
excising inelegance, removing redundancy,
deleting the tautologous, cancelling the inexact.
Squashy clichés and dubious euphemisms thud
into the bin on top of the platitudes riddled
with codlin. Botched words pile up, the dud
sentences are foaming in off-white drifts
around your ankles. But it will soon come right.
The tone will be impeccably judged. Expression
and sense will meet; the whole will be replete
with meaning and, quite possibly, wordless.
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