Confessions

Sometimes I use the word "metaphor" when I know damn well the phrase in question is a simile. I like the word "metaphor." I feel awful about this. I don't like the word "analogy," although I do like "analog."

It is like my poem about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, where I wrote "carriage" instead of "car" because it scanned better. Only, it's important that it's a car - he was proud of it being a car, went to trouble to find this car, one of the first made in Austria; this car was an example of the country's future. Eventually, guilt got the better of me, poetic license or not, and I revised.

I still have the assassin shoot through a window pane, even though this also did not happen. Even though not only was he outside of the cafe, but he ran up to the car and fired point blank, and the Archduke did not fall down; he stayed sitting up. But I have to leave the breaking window in - the sound, the image. I have to leave it because the cafe is the Archduke, and the window is his ability to look at the world, and mechanical terms for human processes were all the rage in the literature of the time, and the center of the poem is a

metaphor.

...

(I also like ball points. I like the feeling that I'm rolling my pen along the page; loops are especially fun. I like the sheen of the ink. When I want to draw, or write a letter for someone else's eyes, fountain pens, dip pens, and artist's pens are the way to go. When I want to write a lot, quickly, and the words are all that matter, Bic ballpoints are it. I hope this confession doesn't drive you away, or lower your estimation of me as a writer.)