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 incomplete sentences, that somehow made great titles.
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