Redaction Poetry
I have been crossing out pages and pages of text from Nancy Drew books and Moby Dick. Here's what's left over. There, I fixed it.
Dick #1
A new a few and nothing interesting. There were sailors sitting around. So cold, wet, rusted. No empty beds. All I could think about was the night, waiting to see his face and body a knot in the corner of the room. Remember that a man who is ugly on the outside can still be good on the inside, the dark shouted. I watched. There was a man, a little fire burning forehead to mine. I woke early. I peeked. More questions hard and dangerous. I thought about this strange evening the whole day. I argued without saying a word. Then, quietly pulling, glad to hear, my heart was beating. Dick #4
We shouted but with the shadows of night spread over us. I was the last, the strange one, the first to catch this ghost. I wasn’t sure whether any of us wandered and dreamed of things far away. Like a swarm of bees all pulling toward the boiling water silently. It was almost like peeling an orange. Suddenly, a bursting like a mirror awake familiar, darkness came and made jokes. The one last job a single giant word. |
Dick #2
It was a cold ocean. Glittering carpet of blue and silver. A freezing spray wrapped us in good-byes. Old sailors slowly flew over us. Lonely shipmates, hard as nails, also very careful, ready for a fight, but when the time came brothers. More like ghosts than men. I cannot see how to take a breath. A strange sound asking for our lives. The hardest thing to kill. 
Dick #3
The days and wind filled my eyes open. Most interested in the things that must have been true. For instance, he was an angry, strange beauty so calm that we were all at once ready in all directions leaping still trying to understand the other mysterious men, carefree devils who curled and licked the clouds swimming toward the storm. 
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Nancy Drew: The Shadow #1
As usual, tomboyish. The wind had risen but eluded capture sharp sorry a brown swirling cloud an agonizing wait a mystery too dangerous for a girl to delay her departure. The far side of the man’s affection followed, dodged, disappeared. One thing we learned without speaking. The way you held the empty desert for awhile among all the handsome cowboys. |
Nancy Drew The Shadow #2
As soon as the men finished, abruptly hurried without saying a word, the girls appeared but could not rid their minds of his shoes. Nancy Drew: The Shadow #3
The engine started at once she confessed and drove without lights, boiling, looking. Quietly the men arose and led the girls wide-eyed just after midnight clinging. We came a long way before trouble started. Afraid to move I listened. It was the far end of confusion. 
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