Some hard decisions--crafting a new manuscript

So I cut the secondary and tertiary sequence out of the manuscript I've been working on. Here it is now:

Table of Contents

Atlas

These are your battlefields

These are your boardwalks

This is your breeze

These are your bridges

These are your canyons

These are your capital cities

This is your city

These are your countries

These are your docks

These are your hagiographers

These are your holy places

These are your horizons

These are your interstates

These are your maps

These are your meadows

These are your monuments

This is your Oceania

These are your parks

These are your pastures

These are your plains

These are your salt flats

These are your skies

These are your springs

These are your strings of barbed wire

This is your tremor

These are your volcanoes

This is your wall

Ledger

This is your aftermath

This is your art

These are your asylums

These are your banners

These are your billboards

This is your church

These are your engines

These are your evenings

These are your foundries

These are your goods

These are your inquests

This is your light

These are your mercies

These are your murders

These are your nights

These are your orders

This is your purview

These are your processions

This is your product

These are your questions

These are your radio towers

These are your ramparts

This is your reliquary

This is your sanitarium

These are your spires

These are your squares

These are your structures

These are your temples

This is your tomb

This is your weather

This is your window

These are your winters

Zoo

This is your assembly

This is your beastiary

These are your beasts

These are your birds

These are your coffee people

These are your dead

These are your dissidents

These are your followers

These are your horses

These are your nurseries

These are your phantoms

These are your refugees

This is your rival

These are your scribes

These are your stables

These are your subjects

This is your subject

These are your sugar men

These are your witnesses

Appendix

This is your photo

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It's cleaner. There's a palpable gap in the last section. I'm going to try to back-fill them during this poem-a-day group writing adventure I'm in. There needs to be more inhabitants in the book. There's also an arc with an artist and a general that I've abandoned, but there are still the poems from that arc housed within this current formulation of the manuscript, so I need to either cut or expand. I think I might expand. Problem is the manuscript measures out to be 89 pages. A problem if I was planning on entering the thing into contests, but I don't.

***

Other things, I changed my title. It used to be "Dear Empire," but so many of the poems had that address, that I wanted the title to provide an ur narrative. Something that is deeper.

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Assembled it while listening to these guys: