It lovingly surveys the battlefield,
a plain and pallid page which soon will roar
to consonants and vowels and words that wield
the power to make paragraphs, and yet
in sentence-trenches desperately will fight
through fusillades of adjectives and get
caught up in noun entanglements that blight
an adverb-cratered landscape all at sea,
while verb bombardments rumbling within
the lexicon leave punctuation free
to scatter mines and boost commotion’s din.
The no-man’s-land that’s left displays my craft,
a pen-created, disarrayed first draft.