So… last night I went to balls, (which for those of you who don’t know, is this wonderful midnight cabaret / open-mike every saturday at the southern theater). There was one poet. A guy I’ve seen perform there in the past, but always music. But it wasn’t really even his poem that struck me so much as a poem he read before his poem. I did some web searching, and it was called Very like a whale, by Ogden Nash. It’s very funny, and well worth reading.
Of course, I hope it’s tongue-in-cheek.
I wanted to write this whole big diatribe about metaphor, and how it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I spent so much time looking for that poem (and I’m glad that I did!) that now the wind has been taken from my sails like a blowjob on prom night.
Here’s something I wrote this morning thinking about all this:
Metaphor is a bitch.
The bitch-winter of understanding.
Metaphor whips reality into submission,
leaving little bloody trails
like roadmap clots.