Homework: metaphors

I hate metaphors. Metaphors are like, like, I don’t know, like graffiti on a wall. No that’s wrong. Graffiti on a wall can be beautiful, on urban decaying walls, on freshly poured suburban concrete, those eyesores erected to separate: the good citizens from the bad: the cars from terrorist pedestrians: graffiti as resistance, graffiti culture pop culture pop art NY subway Berlin wall. Il est interdit d’interdire. No, not like graffiti.

Metaphors are more like, like, paint on a woman’s face. Foundation clogging the pores of delicate woman’s skin, pollution clogging stomates of a young birch leaf. White lead on geisha’s skin, death. A poisoned apple for Snowwhite, skin white as snow lips red as blood. I do like black eyes though, kohl, oh but black lead too. Still, smokey eyes sixties Twiggy Marilyn who was that girl Velvet Underground Andy Warhol’s muse she never took it off just put on a fresh layer of mascara in the morning Edie Sedgwick? Suicide? Or runny black eyeliner Courtney Love or even even on men feminine men Kurt Cobain. No, not like paint on a woman’s face.

Ugly like, like a metaphor in a haiku. And yet how so tempting. The impression on that day, that moment, the very first thing that goes through your head: it’s an image, a metaphor isn’t it? But writing it down like you saw it, show don’t tell, the metaphor the image will form in the readers head. In such a short space in so few words. Oh how difficult! So many haikus thrown in the bin -- metaphorically of course! Basho’s old pond: no sign of a metaphor yet the entire haiku is a metaphor, a metaphor for the lived experience for the image the feeling the sensation that the poet wants to elicit/summon/unearth/share… After rooting them out ruthlessly I should now put them back in? Are all haikus metaphors anyway? Is the whole of literature?

Oh I better write something. A paragraph, a thing, anything. Anything as long as it has a metaphor in it. Any car colour as long as it’s black. Shouldn’t be too hard.

She applied paint on her face like graffiti on a wall. Partly to hide that face that she had to watch in the mirror every morning. No.

She applied paint on her face. Instead of looking in the mirror she looked out to that stained concrete wall with leaky protruding pipes opposite her bathroom window, at the graffiti of topless busty women two storeys down.

She applied paint on her face like a metaphor on the thick poreclogging foundation holding up the decaying urban wall

What?

She applied. Pain. On her. Face.

Pain! That’s pretty good. Leave it at that.

Great graffiti blog post: Garage doors of Dublin lanes