A Suggested Change

 The word scrape gives me the willies.

I can envision a bloody and painful knee

that has suffered an encounter with the road,

or deeply scratched paint on a freshly financed car.

When children get into a scrape, teachers get involved,

threats are made, parents are called, stress levels rise.

I’m thinking we could do away with the word scrape

and simply go about our lives without issue.

Some sort of literary word-chisel would be needed

to remove the word from our language, or perhaps

a very sharp putty knife, the kind used for dictionaries.

We could just scrape it off.