Urban Poetics

in a busy simile-like street

with masks of synecdoche and metonymy

so many metaphors are dancing wildly

that no oxymoron can elbow his way

through crowds of symbols and hyperboles

to his long lost friend paradox

trying to converse with a shy-looking allusion


after standing too long on tiptoes

between consonance and assonance

i become an internally-rhymed road plate

pointing towards the shiny euphony

with no onomatopoeia painted on my face

hardly visible beside the fast lane


Changming Yuan