Clichés

He wanted to describe her beauty except that all virginal, untouched words eluded him—he had to make do with those that had already traveled within the bitter mouths of street sweepers, their eyes sunken, the somber shadows underneath recounting a night devoid of sleep. Or the words that have journeyed though the acid ravaged esophagus of a single mother, one toiling through the night as would a nocturnal beast so as to feed her emaciated children.

He yearned to describe her azure blue eyes, chestnut brown hair and nose ridden with sun spots using the words of the most circumloquacious of writers, yet they failed him and all that remained were the following clichéd adjectives, verbs, and adverbs:

Her hair was reminiscent of a fine thread woven together by a translucent substance.
Her eyes glittered like stars in the sky.
Her skin was sun kissed and her cheeks rosy.
Her laugh reminded him of children at play.
Her lips recalled the color of a flowering red rose.

The sole words available to him were as used and battered as a worthless prostitute and had he uttered them, permitted them to materialize and traverse the space composed of particles and organic matter, to reach her delicate ears, she would have recoiled—her lack of uniqueness reverberating within the shallow depths of such clichés.

Every woman yearns to be defined as unique, as an anomaly, and the clichés that have often voyaged from one cavity filled mouth to another, disintegrate the illusion of the special nature of these beings composed of hair, fluttering eyelashes and double X-chromosomes.