Warning
A leopard cannot change while the sun shines
/it is clear/
all that glitters in its spots will cross the bridge
before the swine//
so desist from putting your cart ahead to skin a cat!
There’s more than one way to lose one’s best friend,
/believe me/
don’t cast your pearls far from the tree.
Heed my advice// good things come to those
who hang him.
Make your hay and spare my rod.
One man’s meat is not gold and an apple
never falls
to catch the worm.
If one man’s dog is another man’s poison, why does the early bird not bite
the hand
that waits?
/and is not heard/
This is in partial (and inadequate) response to a prompt by Bjorn over at dVerse Poets. He invites us to mix our metaphors, but I’ve chosen some proverbs and sayings, which produced some unusual insights when jiggled and matched anew. The formatting isn’t quite right – it just doesn’t work on the screen/online as it does on my notebook. Here’s to the superior power of the printed page!
findingtimetowrite 
Perhaps the format wasn’t what you’d have dreamed of, Marina Sofia. But there’s a lot to reflect on here. I think that’s what’s wonderful about metaphors, proverbs and the like. There’s so much there to mentally digest…
It also makes quite serious statements sound droll – so a nice, dry humour and combination. I do enjoy this kind of experiment!
You aligned yourself bang on with Bjorn’s advice about cliches; whipping up a joyous ride through the chaff-gardens, madhouses, funhouse mirrored chambers, & Lewis Carroll tea parties. I like the lines
/good things come to those/who hang him/. For some reason I first read it /who hangs me/ which is even more macabre.
Oooh, now there’s an idea…!
Yes, it’s great fun working like that – it jogs and jostles something in the brain, doesn’t it?
Enchanting, haunting. Delightful, delirious.
A bit like a drunken Mad Hatter party, I did enjoy it! Thank you so much.
Oh, I will have to read this a few times…..to piece together the parts of the puzzle!
Great exercise in creative writing….while I struggle to make two words rhyme!
Ah, rhyme is hugely overrated – I rarely manage it myself!
Have fun piecing the puzzle…
Ah! It’s puzzling… and that too in such a good way. I love your creative tangling of proverbs, if I may call it so. 🙂
Thank you, and hope you’ll join in the tangling…
Ah, very clever crafting here, Marina Sofia; I recognize many of those mixed cliches, and I like the way you wove them together. I especially like ‘don’t cast your pearls far from the tree.’
Maybe it will lead to some new cliches! Thank you, Mary, very much appreciate your words.
This is a masterly mash-up which is utterly coherent in a weird way. I love the subtlety of the placement and distortion of the elements of some familiar phrases.
The more you mash up the more coherent it seems to become – I noticed this weird effect, here and in other’s writing.
As someone who has a fondness for proverbs this made for a delightful read -thank you Marina.
I love proverbs too – at some point I should do something combining proverbs from other languages…
I like these “proverbs” a lot. I agree that getting the formatting right online can be tricky. It’s so much easier with handwriting. Peace, Linda
Thank you, Linda. I read a publisher’s comment recently about how difficult it is to do justice to poems in e-books, because you can be so much more adventurous with the printed page.
Oh what fun it was to ride in a one hoarse open slay….The formatting often does not cooperate but in spite of it, the mixed metaphors and different views of a metaphor worked wonderfully well!
Do you know, I really thought as a child that there was some slaying involved in Jingle Bells, and didn’t understand why everyone loved that so!
I love this.. somehow you create new truths that somehow makes sense anyway.. this is exactly what I had in mind. The new proverbs really came out like a world as seen through a kaleidoscope.
That’s a perfect description of the effect – I noticed it in all of the poems I’ve read so far.
My God I try to desist, but sometimes you just gotta bite the hand…
Anna :o]
Amen to that! 😉
This is a delight. My fave so far!
Thank you, high praise indeed. I had a lot of fun with it!
wise and fun 🙂
The wisdome is purely coincidental – but it’s great fun playing around with things. Thank you!
Yes, so many of our metaphors have their origins in farming and animals, but that’s not so pertinent now-days. Perhaps the “he’s a real 404” a web link with nothing in it, type of expression is more like what will be used in the future. What do you think ?
Really enjoyed this. Wondered what was coming next! And really thought provoking – some of their origins are quite bizarre, I’d imagine! Thank you for making me smile! x
A tough task, but I think you went for it and did well
Clever and fun and inventive! Love the ‘Heed my advice// good things come to those
who hang him.’
Wonderful!
Ha! As a crime writer, those are obviously my favourite lines too!
I liked it! You dared to go where no metaphor has gone before…haha!
I with that I had written this! It almost makes sense, and yet remains nonsensical. Great fun!!