"Metaphors are Dangerous"
is something my mother said
To me recently while hovering breathless above
her calendar; waiting carefully between the spaces of functions, appointments, and birthdays. Blank.
I asked her why she had me.
What became of my first calendar,
my genesis, the foretelling of my arrival?
What was "god's plan" for that lifeless heap of events she threw away in an afternoon, after everything within it either happened or didnt? Was it whisked away to trash island, with the other spent husks that had the audacity of limited use?
Does it still exist?
Stained and useless, wretched paper
sprawled out in the sun. Has it been completely reformed? Sent out as several paper cups, a newspaper, a birthday cap, a kite?
What would god think of "used" calendars? Would he? When he reached our day of being in the cosmos, did he look at us and say "you will be used or you will be nothing" and pin us to the wall? A useful but temporary tool?
Why do we begin something at all? Why must we blow the balloon up just to let it go? Is it still a "balloon" when it's lying limp in a stranger's field a mile away?
In my mother's silence I knew she had no answer for me, except that "metaphors are dangerous" as her hands full of paper-cuts flattened the page.