Entries From A Terrible Poets' Thesaurus #2: Cartography

Cartography (n.): the production of maps

A method of charting the desires of someone you love but who may not love you back . The construction of a person's personality based on what a poet wants from them . The way one extrapolates a person's skin without having seen it . The study of atlases without shoulders . I am so lost without another person to judge my distance from . Don't substitute Google Maps for this term . Use in place of the noun map even though it is actually associated with the verb form . Producing drafts of fictional freckles on a person whose actual constellation of freckles you should never learn . Often used with constellation . Employed by a poet who suggests they understand patterns although they don't seem to recognize their pattern of objectification or how uncomfortable the subject is to find out they're writing poems about their body or desires . Results more in ex than in x marks . The art of charting a person place or thing whose patterns were long ago graphed by other explorers . The technique of explaining to others how you think you understand a concept merely because you've been over it so many times it feels like you created it 

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.