The Simile Game

Several years ago, struck by the astonishing commercial success of parlour games based on word-power (Pictionary, Boggle, etc.), some friends of mine and I endeavoured to come up with the next 'million dollar concept'. Alas, our best effort was only 'Simile' - the idea being that you would be given two words at random from the whole vast treasury of the Oxford English Dictionary, and then be challenged to produce - under a strict time limit - a witty and convincing explanation of how the one was illustrative of the other.

One particularly 'fertile' pairing, I remember, was SEX and TRAINSPOTTING. One of the best comparisons we came up with back then was this:
They both involve long hours of waiting out in the cold, and then..... you blink, and you've missed it!

However, I favoured the even bleaker, even more cynical:
They are both doomed attempts to perceive variety in an event which is always fundamentally the same.

In my occasional poetic doodlings, I often like to take a similar approach - seizing upon a familiar image and stretching it to its limits. Trains are a particularly rich vein for metaphorical imagery, and so..... a little while ago, I came up with the following.

A correction

to my initial metaphor

I say You derailed me
but that's not fair

I was stationary in a siding
abandoned and rusting

when you briefly re-awoke in me

visions of The Great Age Of Steam