Metaphor Implosion

I have been smashing cockroaches with dictionaries, turning them into sordid pancakes sprouting their gleaming legs like a leftover game of rancid pick-up-sticks, and where have the children gone? What made them leave their game, however disgusting, with the score untallied? And where have the cockroaches gone? Though I have to admit that I admire them for leaving behind the pancakes, so tirelessly were they flipping them that they lost some of their legs and left them behind in the batter proudly as a monument to their industriousness, sticking out like knives of serrated obsidian left behind on sacred ground by a tribe of death-worshipers who, in the daytime, shot furtive glances at the sun that, were it to notice, would scald its surface with a hatred more poignant than a left over game of pick-up-sticks gathering dirt and moss under a tree in the middle of the rainforest a thousand damp miles from the nearest doctor’s office where a toothless old woman’s skin ripples with tanned wrinkles that contain rings within their strata that rival the concentric, irregular circles that grace the stump of a tree awaiting the bulldozer that will rend it from the earth as gently as a team of archeologists prizing the lid off an unknown pharaoh’s sarcophagus with a child’s set of pick-up-sticks they found completely fossilized jutting out from a cliff face like a set of cockroach legs carefully cut and arranged by a former florist who has made up his mind to sell no more bouquets of contemptible roses, setting up his new business under a replica of stone henge made of precariously balanced dictionaries that could crush him and his shop beyond recognition with the weight of their ink alone, but when he makes his way to his shop each day, it isn’t the weight of the ink that bothers him, nor the weight of the covers and the pages, it is the weight of his heart which has been metaphorically exaggerated beyond the weight of all the ink in all the squid of the world, even if each one of them was simultaneously grasped in the mouths of a countless battalion of bull sperm whales who meticulously gathered up all the dark fluid they released in their fear with tiny butterfly nets stuck absurdly between the peaks of their mountainous teeth like decorative toothpicks. Not even if all those whales were so deft in their motions that they gathered every molecule of ink in their nets (though they were rearing to show to us all that they could) and amassed the black excretions into a disk that accreted together from the force of its own gravity, not even this weight would compare to the weight in the old man’s heart, not even if every world revolving around every star was filled only with oceans and squid and pods of assiduous sperm whales, so hyperbolic in scope was the metaphor whose comparison was applied there in the heart of the old man’s heart. Yet the old man couldn't feel the full weight of this figure of speech anymore than a jumble of cockroach legs feels the metaphor of a child’s game of pick-up-sticks on the obsidian-like shards of its spines, didn’t feel it anymore than the death-obsessed tribe felt the extreme anticipation of the team of archeologists hefting the lid of the pharaoh’s sarcophagus with the pick-up-sticks like the legs like their razor thin knives of volcanic black glass that they pinched between their fingers to spill blood from the throats of the fair for the thirst of the gods of the forest. The old man was much like other old men, with his slow, measured steps and his thinning white hair so the weight in his heart might as well be as much as it would if it weren’t really there.