Poetic License: ‘The Ultimate Metaphor’

PHOTO PROVIDED Joe Pacheco
Death is a free and easy metaphor:
Poets, like cowards, die a thousand times
For Beauty, Truth and Love Forevermore.
Quick exit language gets them through the door,
Collects an ode that’s owed them for their rhymes
As Death becomes their severance metaphor.
Their body of work in limited store
Remainders at last in “Last Selected Poems
On Beauty, Love and Truth and Nevermore.”
Eternity’s vast desert — one big bore:
Posterity is postered with worn-out names
Whose deaths were once the latest metaphor.
No Form and Content waging civil war
While villanelles vie with verse in mortal games
For Beauty, Love and Truth and Evermore.
Time and the river lap the endless shore,
Epiphanies wash out to unknown climes;
All Beauty, Truth, and Love are nothing more
Than Death as the ultimate metaphor.