You can’t top the Colosseum
and that’s why the best example
of hyperbole is Cole Porter.
But spinning tales to convince my father
to conquer a bedroom spider
might come close: “It’s as big as a fist,”
I said, “full of rage and fury, unpredictable
atop all those legs!” I invoked the words
Invasions! Armies! and Collusion!
A spider with an agenda
who plans to consume me with a grin,
that up-to-no-goodnik arachnid.
And maybe there’s nothing more hyperbolic
than the heart itself;
and how much of your heart
is a spider, light and dark
and spinning out clutches
of melodramatic demise.
The giant is another size of hyperbole:
stupendous, immense, overwhelming;
and when you’re down in a matrix
you can’t actually see how big she is,
just shockingly big, too big,
as big as there ever was, full of sun
so bright it blinds the whole valley
and wilts all the weeds. Gaudy giant
in mirrored, sparkling disco boots
the size of skyscrapers,
(not technically hyperbole in that,
since we’re talking about Colossus herself)…
(Madeline Kahn took to The Muppets
one time to battle a monster who would crush
everything she ever loved.
“Sometimes you have to talk your troubles
down to a size to where you can handle them,” she said.)
…but hyperbole is a thing so big it grazes the sun
and is often confused with the sun.
You know it’s true what they say:
don’t confuse love with adulation.
And I will say this: don’t confuse hyperbole
with something truly sublimely big
like the otherworldly glow
of my prodigious heart hanging in the glint
of early monring on your sunlit, frosted web.
“You’re the Top” (with hyperbolic variations) by Ethel Merman (1934), Ella Fiztgerald (1956), Anita O’Day (1956), Sammy Davis, Jr. and Carmen McRae (1957), Hal Linden and Eileen Rodgers (1962), the late-great Madeline Kahn herself and Burt Reynolds (1974), Rosemary Clooney (1982), Stacey Kent (2003) and Sutton Foster and Colin Donnell (2011)