The Death of Simile: The Future of Poetry?

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

from "The Trouble with Poetry" by Billy Collins

I am sitting at my desk, wearing a pink cardigan over my pajamas. It is still dark. It is not yet morning. I hear the pied piper ice cream truck, already sounding its chimes. I hear church bells from the nearby Basilica. I hear garbage trucks. I look at my plants and notice my rumpled bed.

There is nothing more to compare these moments to, dark and warm here in my room, and I wonder what will happen when we run out of oil, food, materials for recycled messenger bags, and similes, and when everything just stops.

Perhaps, in a way, this has already happened. Some have already taken a choose-your-own-adventure approach to the creation of images. If there was ever a harbinger of progressive poetics, it would, of course, be Soulja Boy.

'We on the phone like...'
The profundity of this and similar lyrics compels me to wonder if perhaps merely the first half of any simile is necessary, followed by beats, mumbles, a melodic representation of a ten-digit telephone number, or a string of da-da-da-das. Because for some reason, when we hear "We takin' pics like..." we know exactly what he means.

Proposed Solutions
Now, if the solution to the so-called "oil crisis" is a so-called "lifestyle change," how can we remedy this comparison dilemma?

'You could be my Bonnie, I could be your Clyde'
One idea is to start using metaphors exclusively, thus doing away with "like" and "as" altogether. Unfortunately, this concept is like switching to corn ethanol: unsustainable and pointless.

'Everything about you I like it, I love it'
Or, we could just stop describing things altogether. We could stop needing images. We could stop needing to know about the steaming coffee, how quiet the night was, how the curtains swung, the taste of cinnamon tea on her mouth, his whistling, the smell of spring, the morning light. If we could stop wondering about these things we could go on without poetry at all.

'No tellin' what I'm gon' do; baby I'm about to show you'
Maybe, in the future, our minds will be born already full of images. "My love is like," you hear, and in an instant your brain selects an image from its catalog of comparisons. Jamie Foxx, however, must have had an English teacher like mine, always harping to "show, don't tell" in our compositions, and this--this gives me hope for the future of poetry.