The Worst

i found it skulking
in a pile of broken poems

it glared at me accusingly
as if demanding that i read it

the more i read
the worse it got

i knew what I had to do
i had to edit
i had to edit the hell out of it
maybe with a sledgehammer
or an axe

relentlessly I persevered
chiseling out any trace
of punctuation and commonsense

the words were dying of exhaustion
by the time I got done with it

now i thought
now at last it is not the worst i ever wrote

but much more like
the second worst
Copyright © | Year Posted 2023

Poem

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