The gramophone, the records and the sound
The music  was my essence and my ground
The needle  and the groove were made with skill
What artistry, what craft,what vital will
When money was in short supply. how found?

The cat was watching as the disc went round
A gentle paw extended till we frowned
She was the softest cat we ever owned
When she died we  heard our hearts grow still
The gramophone

When we lost  another cat, we groaned
As the pebbles on the seashore moan
We hear the sound  of laughter, high the hill
The children that we were  will play there still
The music  lingers where  we children roamed.
The gramophone

I said , here is the lemon mousse.
Just what I need to rub out my pencil marks

Here is the Vindaloo!
Can’t I use the toilet?

I roasted the potatoes
So it wasn’t just me!

The dinner is hot
How about you?
I’m still cold

The meat is well  browned  now
That’s racist
Alright, it’s black.
You idiot!

The sprouts taste like strawberries
I wondered where  they had gone.

I’ve lost the shopping.
It’s in the kitchen
And I lost my dress
Mmm come over here.
Why are you licking my head?
To see  if I need to put salt on you.

It’s sweet and sour chicken
Chinese?
Do they export chickens?
Dead right!

I saw  a bull in Dublin
Ireland’s green and pleasant land
There   was a  bullfight
I blame the EU.
Why,is it compulsory?
No, but Boris Johnson seems to be.
Put him in the ring!
A matador is hard to find
I’ll take a pot shot.
But is it British?

http://examples.yourdictionary.com/figure-of-speech-examples.html

Extract:

“Using Hyperbole

Hyperbole uses exaggeration for emphasis or effect. Examples are:

• I’ve told you a hundred times
• It cost a billion dollars
• I could do this forever
• She is older than dirt
• Everybody knows that

Using Irony

Irony is when there is a contrast between what is said and what is meant, or between appearance and reality. Examples are:

• “How nice!” she said, when I told her I had to work all weekend. (Verbal irony)
• A traffic cop gets suspended for not paying his parking tickets. (Situational irony)
• The Titanic was said to be unsinkable but sank on its first voyage. (Situational irony)
• Naming a Chihuahua Brutus (Verbal irony)
• The audience knows the killer is hiding in a closet in a scary movie but the actors do not. (Dramatic irony)

Using Metaphor

Metaphor compares two unlike things or ideas. Examples are:

• Heart of stone
• Time is money
• The world is a stage
• She is a night owl
• He is an ogre”

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/trope

https://rhetoric.sdsu.edu/resources/what_is_rhetoric.htm

Extract:

Cicero (ca. 90 BCE):

There is a scientific system of politics which includes many important departments. One of these departments—a large and important one—is eloquence based on the rules of art, which they call rhetoric. For I do not agree with those who think that political science has no need for eloquence, and I violently disagree with those who think that it is wholly comprehended in the power and skill of the rhetorician. Therefore we will classify oratorical ability as a part of political science. The function of eloquence seems to be to speak in a manner suited to persuade an audience, the end is to persuade by speech.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1872-73):

What is called “rhetorical,” as a means of conscious art, had been active as a means of unconscious art in language and its development, indeed, that the rhetorical is a further development, guided by the clear light of the understanding, of the artistic means which are already found in language. There is obviously no unrhetorical “naturalness” of language to which one could appeal; language itself is the result of purely rhetorical arts. The power to discover and to make operative that which works and impresses, with respect to each thing, a power which Aristotle calls rhetoric, is, at the same time, the essence of language; the latter is based just as little as rhetoric is upon that which is true, upon the essence of things. Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, p 21.

Steven Mailloux (1989):

[Rhetoric is] the political effectivity of trope and argument in culture. Such a working definition includes the two traditional meanings of rhetoric—figurative language and persuasive action—and permits me to emphasize either or both senses, differently in different discourse at different historical moments, in order to specify more exact

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/jul/23/incantata-review-pain-poetry-and-potatoes-with-paul-muldoon

Extract:

“In Townsend’s compelling performance, it certainly can. He glides through Muldoon’s torrent of wordplay and allusions, before slowing to a low growl of fury with his lover for her refusal of medical treatment in favour of herbal remedies, through a sense of fatalism: “The fact that you were determined to cut yourself off in your prime / because it was pre-determined has my eyes abrim.” The rush of tiny memories that catch him off-guard, the snatches of music from their shared past, the truths about the ways in which they could hurt each other – all flash across his face as his deep voice falters. He captures the one-step-forward, two-steps-back experience of grieving, its iterative nature reflected in his physical process of creating the rows of shapes, imprinted on paper.

With its recapitulation of the poem’s lines throughout, and in voiceover at the end, this performance beautifully suggests that the processes of printmaking and of composing the poem have become one. Here the poet salutes the artist, both of whom have their “ink-stained hands”, and the production becomes a celebration of the ways “art can be made” from pain”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/18/the-future-of-poetry

Extract:

“The simplest and best answer I got at the event in Oxford was “for paying attention”. Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society, echoes that phrase. “One of the things poetry gives all of us is a way of developing an attentiveness to life, a way of observing the world, of noticing things and seeing them differently,” she says. A good poem looks closely at the world; does that Martian thing of trying to see it for the first time. Everything else – the emotional charge, the lyrical delight, the intellectual pleasure – is secondary.

The Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes, who teaches poetry at the University of East Anglia, says poems try to capture a reality that is deeper than language. “You’re trying to say: I know what this thing is called,” he says. “It’s called a chair, and that thing is a table. I’ve got this word ‘chair’ and I’ve got this word ‘table’, but there’s something peculiar about this chair and table which using the words chair and table will not actually convey.” Readers, he says, may race through novels because they want to know what happens, but they should look to inhabit poems. “Nobody reads a poem to find out what happens in the last line. They read the poem for the experience of travelling through it.”

I ask Szirtes whether he thinks “What is poetry for?” is a valid question. To my surprise – because plenty of poets think it’s an absurd question and that no art form should worry about its function – he believes it is far from academic. “It’s a question that does preoccupy you the longer you do it,” he says. “When you first do it, you never ask that question. But as time goes on, you begin to be conscious of it. My sense now is that when people begin to speak, when language develops, there are two essential instincts: one of the instincts says, ‘What is this?’; the other one says, ‘So what happens?’ So what happens is the beginning of syntax, of storytelling. The other feeling, where you are confronted by some aspect of reality for which language is always inadequate, is the instinct that goes into poetry.” Poetry, he suggests, “begins with a cry” – of anguish, fear or frustration. Szirtes quotes Emily Dickinson’s maxim that “a poem is a house that tries to be haunted”