Entries From A Terrible Poet's Thesaurus #18: Alarm

Alarm (noun): a warning sound, a signal for attention

The sound morning makes to steal you from dreams . Surprise . Every day the same surprise . A buzzing in your pocket . A howl in a forest when you do not live near a forest . A howl in a city that once was a forest . A nagging reminder that the day requires movement. A thing to snooze . A raised voice before you touch something hot . But everything's burning these days . keep your hands to yourself . A red switch in a school for avoiding homework . To cause fear . sometimes when no danger is present . A bipartisan political ploy . An unethical journalism tactic . Tabloid sales booster . How can there always be a state of emergency . There is a state of emergency . moreso than the last time there was a state of emergency . The boy who cried wolf was actually being chased by wolves . but the old wolves were slow and elderly and we assumed they wouldn't catch him . they caught him . but he lived. Now there are bigger wolves . Now the boy . injured in the last attack . is slower . The bells have been clanging for so long . it's difficult to remember to hear them

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(I'm compiling the Terrible Poets' Thesaurus by reading poems by unfamiliar writers and jotting down unusual word choices. Once I find a term three times, I attempt to define it by deconstructing it as it appears to me in the context of the poems in which they're used, which are unlikely to be the way the authors intended them. Alternately, I look at my own poems and find words that I overuse and attempt to imagine how others might interpret them.)