Beating a Dead Cliché Back to Life
Artist unknown, likely AI
Beating a Dead Cliché Back to Life
I found it in the alley of language;
face down, trampled by greeting cards,
a once-proud phrase with flies of familiarity
buzzing its tired vowels.
“Rise and shine,” I whispered,
like a motivational poster with a pulse.
It did not.
So I performed CPR,
Compressed Predictable Rhetoric,
pumping its chest of well-worn wisdom,
counting in threes:
“One! Two! You got this!”
Nothing but the faint wheeze of déjà vu.
I shocked it with irony - clear! -
a thousand volts of self-awareness through its sagging metaphor.
It twitched.
Someone in the crowd murmured, “It is what it is,”
which did not help.
I tried accessorizing,
draped it in fresh adjectives, gave it boots, a backstory,
a minor in philosophy.
But you can’t deodorize inevitability.
You can’t mascara a platitude into a peacock.
Finally, I stopped swinging.
Knelt beside the poor old thing.
Listened.
Turns out clichés die from overuse, not lack of love.
They fade like coins rubbed smooth
by too many hopeful thumbs.
So I buried it gently under a headstone that read:
“Here lies ‘At the End of the Day.’
It had a good run.”
And walked home determined to trip over my own words,
fresh bruises, original clumsiness;
alive.
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This poem is the fifteenth line from one of my earlier poems, that poem was made up of nothing but incomplete sentences, that somehow made great titles.
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This is an amazing piece! So much here....such familiarity with language, and poetic terms and you just nail them within what you're saying here. You had me with the first stanza....it intrigued me and the rest of the piece doesn't stop. I liked so much about this...hard to pick out what to emphasize...ah, this
ReplyDelete" tried accessorizing,
draped it in fresh adjectives, gave it boots, a backstory,
a minor in philosophy.
But you can’t deodorize inevitability.
You can’t mascara a platitude into a peacock."
How I'd love for you to stop by our dVerse LIVE session on Saturday and read this! Think about it. A wonderful write!
I always look forward to your wordsmithery, Chris, and this poem is a great example of ‘beating a dead cliché back to life’, which had me grinning, especially the image of ‘a once-proud phrase with flies of familiarity
ReplyDeletebuzzing its tired vowels’, the ‘Compressed Predictable Rhetoric’, the ‘faint wheeze of déjà vu’ and ‘you can’t mascara a platitude into a peacock’. It’s a good thing that ‘clichés die from overuse’ – I sometimes felt like dying from all the ones overused by English students when I was still teaching and examining.
This is so much fun, and so true... it reminds me of what we did some years ago when we tried to beat some life in those clichés... https://dversepoets.com/2015/04/30/mtb-cathachresis-and-recycling-cliches/
ReplyDeleteOooh. This is genuinely so fricking good w.t.f. am wordless...
ReplyDeleteI always luv the use of imagery in your poem, but this one tskes the cake frosting and all. Bravo
ReplyDeleteMuch love