Herding Cats Through a Thesaurus
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Herding Cats Through a Thesaurus
I tried to shepherd adjectives today—
a feral flock of synonyms hissing in italics.
They scattered at “serendipitous,” clawed the drapes of “lugubrious,”
coughed up a hairball shaped like “persnickety” on the welcome mat of my draft.
Every time I shook the kibble tin of clarity,
they blinked at me with twelve different words for aloof.
My verbs refuse collars.
They slip out the back door of intention,
return at midnight with a raccoon named “juxtapose”
and a story that doesn’t quite parse.
I set out saucers of brevity—they prefer the cream of excess.
They knock “concise” off the counter
just to watch it fall in increasingly ornate ways.
And I, benevolent zookeeper of nuance, stand in a bathrobe of overthinking,
waving a laser pointer labeled “meaning,”
while the whole lexicon ricochets off the furniture.
The trick, I’m told,
is not to herd them but to let one curl in your lap—
purring a single, honest word
until it forgives you for the rest.
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This poem is the third line from one of my earlier poems, that poem was made up of incomplete sentences, that somehow made great titles.
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