What's a Metaphor?

Did you know that life
is made more tenable
by the simple use of a proper metaphor?
 When in the throws of trying times,
unlike a mirror's more pedestrian rhymes
this simple act of magical thinking
could give your psyche a fresh new inkling.

By combining distance with reflection
metaphors can alter one's circumspection.

My own diary is

artless yet elegiac; 

a place for synonyms
to mingle with verbs.

Suffice it to say

swapping

 "like" for "as",

has brought closure

to so many of my words.

You see
this way there's
less a chasm between
the implicit and the implied,
revealing a surprising comparison
between two things
rarely found
side by side.

For instance I liken my emotions
 to what I see up in the sky,
dark clouds equal frustration,
red horizons make my heart sigh.

I am guilty of thinking

(dare I leave it at that?)

surely an argument

can be made for favoring

metaphorical over literal fact.

Take the fundamentalist

searching for the ark

at the bottom of the sea

or mistaking Moby Dick

for the whale that swiped Jonah

right out of his family tree!

I confess

I'm desperate
to find meaning

in the world at large,

though I'd rather not
reduce the stars

to poetic constraints,
well, maybe just
Pluto and Mars.

On the subject of the heavens
I offer this word

of consternation:
I have found that

that which goes

unexamined

does tend

towards constellation.

So taking these thoughts

to heart

I examine their meaning

with glee.
Case in point:  though I am

the black sheep of my clan,

I'm neither black

nor am I a sheep!

Metaphors bring

the unrelated together,

I think you can plainly see,

it's how one conjugates a royal rift

and I don't mean

with the royal "we".

Take for example

a well rounded snow man,
formed simple for the sake of fun.

His carrot, coal and scarf;

props of a sentence being
slowly undone by the sun.

Aren't we all made

of that same holy water
transmuted from

sea to sky?
What is a metaphor
if not a child's eye view
born in a snowman's eye.

Peter Valentyne
October 29th, 2019