Twelve elves, you know the story is true.

Twelve elves, and this is what they do—

 

One only watches for spelling botches,

Two takes tense and makes it make sense.

Three is malaprops, where the right word is dropped—

And another slips in, but should be stopped,

Like pantry and panty, not the same, you can see,

But even worse, when one is looking for tea!

 

4, 5 and 6, punctuation to fix,

And run-ons and splices—

Which aren’t the nicest.

 

Seven ate nine, the scene of the crime,

With cannibal fervor, and belches sublime.

 

And the rest of the crew, now scanning the page,

Mad at the others, are striking in rage,

And tap-dance on my keyboard in fitful rampage

Olnvdzi….?i0295-9@%@&&emWia949kalenaldand#—

Quit that, you three, and get back to the grind

of fixing my poems, for meter and rhyme…

 

Now, these twelve elves had a big task to do;

To edit the poems as we write quite a few,

But one by one, they’ve all fallen asleep.

Seems they stopped counting words

And now count the sheep.

 

Ewe are done a very good job, and breaks you should take:

Edit tomorrow, when the elves are awake.