Entries From A Terrible Poet's Thesaurus #4: Parade

​Parade (n.): A public procession

The slow march to death . Procession of familiar faces with names you can't place . A term used to describe the volume of ex lovers of the former partner you slut shame in order to recover from the devastating history that you view as nothing more than a prologue to them meeting and then leaving you but which is actually their perfectly reasonable life . The traffic blocking your way to work . A line of people from a community that you are supposedly a part of but who you are now watching from the sidewalk . See how they advance while you stand still . Watching . The awkward video for a soundtrack of dying brass swans playing nearly unrecognizable versions of songs that you've hated since you learned to recognize sound patterns . The slowest way to review memories . A verb to describe cultish velocity . The way a hyperbolic martyr imagines his friends and lovers abandon him

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.