Nikki Maxwell Poet Free verse

How Do Idioms Come to Be?

How do idioms come to be?

Did one friend
on one day
tell the other
about the strange feeling they felt
in their upper intestine after
they heard one shoe drop,
and waited for the other?

And then did this friend respond by saying:
"Yes, I feel that way too, how remarkable,"
with the pair of pals 
telling another pair,
who then told another pair,
until everyone was talking about shoes?

Or is it something more cosmic?
Is it genetic?
Is there something encoded in our blood 
and cholesterol that whispers to us,
urging we reference footwear
when we feel our arteries throb with anxiety?

And how many times does one person
have to say one thing for 
it to become metaphor?
Exactly how famous does somebody need to be
for their very life history to become canon?

When we look back on the famous who's-who
of past centuries,
how many of them were remembered purely by
the weight of their name?
And how many were forgotten the second
dirt hit their coffin?

How many phrases have we forgotten because we didn't say them enough?

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