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Sport 40: 2012
One day I woke up and all the similes were gone
One day I woke up and all the similes were gone
Because the vase was orange, my mother banished it from the lounge.
Because the lemons are green, that lone yellow one is a clown.
Because the story is unwritten, it raises its hackles when I try
to extract it from a pair of pants on the washing line.
Because the light still shines, a bird sounds from the tree
but the tree won’t let the bird go; it is too cold.
Because my mother worked for months on the garden, the squirrels
sprint along the fence and drop softly like fruits into the garden
and wreck all that’s growing, those fucking squirrels,
because Nature no longer understands the point of a garden.
A woman runs out of our house in an apron
shrieking, shooing her arms off her body.
Because I woke up, nothing could ever be described again.
There was no wind picking up and no water running,
all the elements had lost their limbs;
the tame sheep that I had raised from birth
headbutted me when I was crouched in the paddock,
because it no longer understood the point of me, or it did, and
preferred to be free:
My lungs went into reverse and I mushroomed out in the grass.
An airplane shaved strips from the whiskerous sky.
I didn’t recognise it anymore, and I cried.