Red Pencil

I can still feel your slashing notations that nearly
murdered my love affair with words, knifing
run-on sentences, strangling dangling modifiers,
eviscerating verbs not in agreement with their subjects.

Lost are the faces but not the traces
of your willing accomplices,
the semantic and pedantic
wielding weapons of academic authority.   

They graded and raided, scraped and raped
virgin paper with a cruelly sharpened point, leaving
behind a blood-stained hexagonal wooden barrel grip
at the scene of the crime.

Go now, go away and board the No. 2 train back
to Ticonderoga, or wherever you are made today,
for now I have poetic license and the freedom to drive
the ungrammatical roads of play.