There is a small
grey monster who
slavers on my left shoulder,
gobbling up inspiration
and spitting out sense,
and I don’t have the heart
to swat him away.

He muses and peruses
the words he sees,
pointing tiny talons
at subject-verb disagreements
and awkward phrasing
and the tritest of clichйs.

Sometimes I shout at him
to be quiet and leave me alone,
and he sullenly slinks back, grumbling
into the hollow of my collarbone
and tapping his claws
until I let him out again.

He’s a necessity, you see—
There will always be essays,
stories, poems, emails,
and no one knows
better than him
where to break a line in two
and when to mend it whole again.
My monster thrives on revision,
picking apart precarious prose and
knocking the bits into place
until they’re constructed sturdily enough
to weather the harshest critical storm.

The glint in his eyes:
so eager to fix me,
the brute,
and it hurts when his pointy nails
dig into my skin.
He cackles with every corrected word.

But I love my little pet.
Without him,
those subjects and verbs would
continue to quarrel
until the neighbours complain.