The Bleeding Draft

Cut the fluff, kill a line,
Murder darlings one at a time.
Tame the adverbs, gut the prose,
Sharpen every sentence’s nose.

Commas shuffle, clauses groan,
Plot holes whisper, all alone.
Characters plead, “We’re not to blame!”
But edits purge them just the same.

Each scene's a corpse I recompose,
With cleaner guts and fewer throes.
A chapter’s bones, now rearranged,
Feel oddly calm, disturbingly changed.

The pace must pulse, the voice must bite,
No passive verbs to dim the night.
I stitch, I slash, I shift, I flay.
Then bleed it all again next day.

No sentence sacred, no phrase immune,
Beneath the cold red editor’s moon.
It’s art, they say, this thing we’ve bred.
But art, my friend, must first be bled.