How To Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors (#poem)

How to Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors

It's not rocket surgery.

First, get all your ducks on the same page.

After all, you can't make an omelette

without breaking stride.

 

Be sure to watch what you write

with a fine-tuned comb.

Check and re-check until the cows turn blue.

It's as easy as falling off a cake.

 

Don't worry about opening up

a whole hill of beans:

you can burn that bridge when you come to it,

if you follow where I'm coming from.

 

Concentrate! Keep your door closed

and your enemies closer.

Finally, don't take the moral high horse:

if the metaphor fits, walk a mile in it.

 

-Brian Bilston

 

I just came across this as 3 Quarks Daily, a cultural aggregator site, which among other things does a new poem daily. It definitely caught my eye, or ear, or something.

 

Brian Bilston is a pseudonym for Paul Millicheap, a British poet with several books out, but who generally releases his new poetry at that place formerly known as Twitter. As the photo suggests he prefers his privacy. Totally new to me, but I'll be keeping my eye out for more.

 

Is it really that easy to fall off a cake? Sounds difficult to me... 😉 

Ed McBain's The Con Man

"Meanwhile back at the morgue..."

The first chapter introduces two cases: Arthur Brown and Bert Kling interview a young black woman working as a maid who's been conned out of five dollars by a pretend preacher, and Steve Carella is called in where a dead body of a woman is found floating by the docks.

 

Brown is determined to find the con man; Carella first has to determine if what he's looking at is a crime, but it is. His floater didn't drown, but went into the water already dead from arsenic poisoning. ("Back at the morgue...")

 

Then a second woman is found floating in the harbor, also dead from arsenic poisoning. Both women have tattoos on their hand.

 

This is the fourth of McBain's series of 87th Precinct novels. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it was a particularly strong entry in the series. McBain can occasionally be didactic about police methods--he does famously precede his novels with:

 

"The city in these pages is imaginary.

The people, the places are all fictitious.

Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique."

In this one, we learned how fingerprints are taken from dead bodies, which was grisly, and maybe interesting? At least relevant to the plot. But there was too much about how con men do their thing, which didn't have much to do with our particular con men. But the final chase was certainly thrilling enough...

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Golden Age (1957). Policeman.

 

I suppose that's Steve Carella on the cover in plainclothes, and Fred di Angelo, the beat cop to whom the body was first reported behind him.

 

So Adam's offspring live...

 

from Vis and Ramin 

So Adam's offspring live, and put away

The happiness and grief of yesterday.

Why should you grieve for what's gone by? Forget!

Why brood on things that haven't happened yet?

Grief won't bring back the past, and all your scolding

Will not prevent the future from unfolding.

Enjoy a hundred years of victory

But one day's all your lifetime here will be ;

Whatever riches you might hope to win

One day alone is yours--the day you're in;

The best course is to look for pleasure, to

Enjoy the single day that's given you. [p. 264]

 

-Fakraddin Gorgani (tr. Dick Davis)

 

Sections in Vis and Ramin often ended in a bit of general wisdom, with applicability (possibly ironic) to what just happened. Just before this is in the story line Vis and King Mobad had been reconciled, and Mobad had given a stack of gifts to both Vis and her nurse. It wasn't to last, of course, and we knew it wouldn't even before what I quoted. "The moon-faced beauty lied, Mobad believed her/And asked her to forgive him that he'd grieved her."

 

I had copied out some other sections as I was reading but they didn't fit in my earlier post. But now, here I am thinking about Iran again...