"anglerfish" poems
I never liked beets; too soft, too red
too round, too bulbous,
too much like a bloodmoon.
I cannot live in these shaman
sleeves. They're heavy as rocks beneath
the waves, soaked to the bone
by a salty, sunless sea. Too much
blue is bleeding into billowing wool, red as beet.
There's never an anglerfish
when you need a light, no beetbulb of flame
for that last rush of smoke before the black
undercurrent squeezes the air too thin.
May 5, 2016
May 5, 2016 at 4:37 AM UTC
I like accelerating
As fast as it can get there
(Because even if it is a Saab,
It's still a sports car)
I like accelerating in the fog
Pressing forward into the unknown darkness
Past the hanging anglerfish lure
On every street lamp
I like to think Keats would like it
(Driving fast in the dark where you know
There's no speed traps)
And I like the word "like" in poetry
Because love on the page means something so
Different from what I mean
(It's a word that
I don't want you associating with me)
Unless you're here to cast me as your Last
Duchess because I love you as much as
I love driving in the dark as much as
I love this song as much as
I love your shoes and I love your eyes
(but I really do love your eyes)
So I don't like the word "love" because it
Implies some kind of favoritism that I'm not
Willing to give you if it means
I only like this song
Means using that word all wrong
Because you're not better than my Saab-
(you just have nicer eyes)
Apr 3, 2013
Apr 3, 2013 at 6:08 PM UTC
A sworn, torn man stands at the top of the world’s longest staircase, and my friends and I have signed up to ride. Millions of others stand between us and the top, waiting for their chance, their prime, to resign. We sulk in the depths of the sea and hope that someday we may be free.
The man holds penned paper that the depths cannot perceive, but we know it. Our ticket to the roller coaster lies, with number, on a digit. I and my friends were anglerfish before, but now we are eels. We no longer need dangly lights to guide us to prey, and now we tie ourselves and each other in knots.
Life is fun later when we are dolphins, then porpoises, then whales with legs, walking onto the seashore as brisk as can be, drinking our saliva as though it were a river overflowing with our survival. We walk in to the forest and steam lobsters over a log-fire. The wings with the tickets laugh at the monotony below him, but we’re below him even in that.
Grey skies cloud overhead, and we realize where we are. I and my friends run from the thunder that comes in every drop, the acid in every drop; where the water helped before, it now forms uncomfortabilities in our skin, nonconforming to the mutations of standard evolution. We need shelter, now, fast, and together. A huge tree is mostly protective.
Eventually a ladder of clouds drops down and draws us like a magnet. We can’t stop it, the clock has rung fourteen for two days now. We then have arms and can climb it, so we do, though the rain left pimples on our faces.
We ascend to the front of the line.
“Hello, ticketman, where are we headed?” we ask. He says, “Darlings, you haven’t been anywhere in the first place; how can you be headed to a where? First, go tackle a why.”
The rollercoaster takes off, shoots off – a rocket propels us through precarious stages of life. We have ups and downs and sideways parts we can’t really decide the morals of, and we enjoy it.
Then we are dead.
Oct 15, 2010
Oct 15, 2010 at 1:24 PM UTC
you reeled me in from
the aegean's slow murmur,
my gills covered in algae, my jaw
chomping rhythmically under
the hollow tree of my mouth.
didn't anyone ever teach you that
fishing for nymphs is more painful
than comb jellies, slower than marlins and
as safe as the glowing earring of
an anglerfish mother?
on the deck of your vessel
you cradled my skeleton gently,
fed me crispy hard coral and
begged me not to eat you in
the night, when mars made his way
toward the fiery backdrop of our
natal charts. how intrigued i was to
find that under your beard hid a
chain mail of scales, the map of
your palms was drafted in plasma,
and your iris is not pigment, but
a distant reflection of geysers
snapping like scorpions out of
the ocean floor.
you spent the nights dancing to the
howl of sirens like no man i'd
ever seen, and somewhere between
our fingers, where you passed me
the whiskey, i threw my arms up
and remembered how to move.
you spent the days following the
wind's hips, you didn't care if she
changed her mind, you said.
you are like the belly of a sea
star. slowly in the twilight
i uncoiled my fear of wandering, i
threw the pit into the open ocean and
the rope followed, slithering down.
now all we have is constellations.
all we have is moon fragments and
bird islands and my hair flying
like a compass, like a shining battle flag.
i can't smell land for miles
and i am not afraid.
Apr 29, 2013
Apr 29, 2013 at 9:58 PM UTC
Your mind is a heart-trembling sight,
And often as you flaunt it I know
I should never tell you it destrings me,
(Sets me wrong and then puts me in tune.)
I mustn't ever never
Say I wish to do the same to you.
(I would caress the insides of your bones,
Kiss your esophagus, clean your arteries;
I would eagerly sew myself inside you.)
I mustn't ever never
Anglerfish my way into saying
"I would be a limb on your body."
And yet "I love you" cannot possibly -
I would live in your synapses quietly
Never intruding, you wouldn't notice me,
Perhaps even forget me by and by;
But I would electric-think my way through
Your toomuchmind sofastly:
I would repair the gaps with
Scraps of myself torn off, I would
Maintain you invisibly with
My unvisible tools unsensed
And silentdense as an atom's center
Whose disvisible weight is universelifting.
I would lift worlds onto you
As though nothing ever sang sadness
And every(right)thing strongly whispering
Through your veins would know
"I want to pulse your blood and beat your heart."
So much more "love" cannot possibly
Desire, I desire (to make you) the
Overloved lover my domain over:
The king and the grass and the sky.
Apr 17, 2012
Apr 17, 2012 at 7:11 PM UTC
She always sang smoothly,
startlingly scrupulously,
after studying the stanzas for mere seconds.
Anglerfish Annie I called her.
A voice as pure as heaven lit her lure,
the one-way ticket that swallowed those kids
into an inescapable abyss.
I watched as those thirsty jaws grew dull,
and that mesmerizing light died out.
Hanging over the windowsill, atop that disturbed building,
her hauntingly beautiful voice showered down once more,
reverberating through my bones as it always had.
As the last note hurried to accompany its creator to the ground,
It was shrouded by the yells and sirens booming from the Institution.
I saw all the lost souls pouring out of her mouth,
And thought of how they knew Annie more than I did.
Nov 9, 2014
Nov 9, 2014 at 7:54 PM UTC
One time
I drew an anglerfish
To impress a boy.
It was beautiful
Black and white
With soulless eyes
And a skeletal frame cloaked in
Tendrils
I showed him the anglerfish
He said it was creepy
I called it stupid fish
Because that's what it had in common
With love
Stupid.
Apr 4, 2014
Apr 4, 2014 at 8:21 PM UTC
Earthworm whiskers stiff with the tension
of a trillion switchboards hissing,
"Mister! Mister! Avoid the 5th dimension!"
More a prison than a picture diminished,
riddled by the Sandman's sentence;
it's a place to the brim with tremptress physics.
Tailor fitted to the yearn for specifics
of a half-pint's peaked interest
like the mantelpiece of an Anglerfish.
Apr 16, 2016
Apr 16, 2016 at 3:42 AM UTC
Leviathan / by: butch decatoria
Linger, loiter longer
Leviathan,
These Lovelorn Lanes Fast
with lustful highs …
Fly
Farther, furthest, way Far away
To Starlight
/sweet nothings,
Interstellar sighs
Of space/ time
Feel the Empty / pain / bleed
Except great expectations’ need
To accept, expecting none
(Yet most believe doing nothing)
It’s Not for reflecting / empathy
To tragedy then forgetfulness,
On purpose, disposable friends distract,
Life’s strange viscosity hopefulness
Motions forward….
Oh monstrosity!
Wishful obsessions, stiff upper lip...
The Silent servants’ musk, mask of milk
White cream silk whips
Aftermath of drunken trippin’
The rush of us who trust, slippin’
On the white, on the hip
snow man fall melts, drip dry
The poles and hell rains down from on high,
Hush now, The storm hither comes...
Torrential
The colossus of silence beyond
Jupiter’s red eye, Ort cloud shroud—
The yearnings surpassing blood,
To feed
The human gargantuan greed
The need for love…
Soon On sale, flesh compliant
A Commerce for feelings to
Galvanize
The Giant
Drowning in his Whale Songs
moonlighting the deep...
Anglerfish
Amidst the pitch of dark sea
Tocold vastness
Go there
That other ocean
infinite canvas interstellar interstate
The Void of space,
Deep Emotions pace
Times asleep & awake
(elsewhere)
Swim my assuaged dreams,
All of thee: ye
Makers bright,
Meteorites brief
flash of freefalling lights
Like my hollow heart’s leap:
Blind,
But for a feeling,
The monster that I trust.
In the human ocean of emotions.
Leviathan.
Oct 7, 2021
Oct 7, 2021 at 8:01 AM UTC
Some say it widens quick
as my fingernails grow and
by the time I die the height of me
has been added to its width
so toss me off the ship
slip me past seaweed grasps
and test this hypothesis.
Some say it can fit in Everest
with a mile to spare
while I did not find the time
or, perhaps, care
to feet it’s summit this tick of the Rolex
this pound of pressure applied
per inch of capillary.
But even here
where bathyscaphe meets hydrosphere
where sunlight is cinema
where goblin sharks gobble darkness
an anglerfish pours it's torch
over basecamp wishing
loneliness was an antidote
for altitude sickness.
My how magnanimous magma
makes me miss my mama,
subducted and spewed out
drawn down from cold to heat
and reborn as calamansi cocktails
at a shackbar on the beach.
Jun 21, 2022
Jun 21, 2022 at 7:05 AM UTC
Wonderful things come out of the darkness
to show us that they too try.
Wonderful things come out of darkness
to show us that they too love what we love.
Wonderful things come out of the darkness
to show us that we're not that different.
Love you little anglerfish!
Feb 26, 2025
Feb 26, 2025 at 10:35 AM UTC
I walk around with my heart
suspended outside of my body
like the deep sea anglerfish and its light.
It hovers in front of my chest
waiting to be noticed by another,
expecting to go unseen by all.
I stare at the 7-11 clerk
under the fluorescent glow,
the harsh brightness exposes the ugliness around us and yet his face is beautiful.
I want to ask if he can see
the muscle floating mid-air in front of me,
does he see how dull its beat has become,
and Has his heart ever left his body?
If so, how did he put it back into place?
He does not look at me.
I leave with my heart trailing behind
reluctantly,
a stray wanting to be fed
and then left alone.
Later that night I lie in bed and sob ritualistically
until my eyes are swollen orbs,
until I breathe in shallow
gasping crying breaths.
I lift my arms and grasp
at the darkness of the room,
as though I am reaching to retrieve
my runaway heart,
But of what use could it be,
once it's back in my chest?
I've a mind full of anger and
God abandoned my heart
long before it abandoned my body.
Jul 3, 2017
Jul 3, 2017 at 9:08 PM UTC
The volume **** in your car is broken
but I think you like it that way.
You have your own dial on the wheel so hat
Only you control the severity of your environment,
Being on your own terms.
So I float here, in your vivarium
It'd be best to breathe your air
and bleed your blood
like my own.
Anglerfish love,
If only the fates were reversed
For I love you and also long to be you
How free to be you,
I ensure.
But could I love myself so dearly,
Embody my mother so clearly,
if my soul was not set
in its role-finding ways?
If I could not claim to be as I am,
Healer of the World for the Fascinating.
Oh, you,
my love.
My all-at-once art,
could you adore my vast emptiness
of who I could have been
if not dedicated to this practice of romance in earnest?
Apr 11, 2021
Apr 11, 2021 at 6:55 PM UTC
Anglerfish anglerfish
you clever lightbulb dangler-fish
May 24, 2025
May 24, 2025 at 1:54 PM UTC
Like a chemical burn, poison on my skin,
The truth slices and stabs from within.
You're out of my reach, distant as the stars,
As if separated by hard iron bars.
An aeroplane flying overhead, to a far-off land,
A ship in the distance, as I lie on the sand:
Yearning for mirages that I'll never catch,
A lost left shoe, without its proper match.
I am a fool - I'll say it yet again,
And write it, indelible, with a stroke of pen.
Sanely insane, aware of my flaws,
Yet Cupid won't let me out of his claws;
He is no angel, but a demon instead,
His cruel jokes strike me like a weight of lead.
I am an anglerfish, and you a coral reef -
I dwell in darkness, while you could blind the sun.
I wish I could turn over a new leaf,
But I'm stuck, like a jammed safety on a gun.
You've made it clear,
I see it now:
There never was a chance;
And yet, my dear,
My heart will bow
To you, as if in a trance.
Curse you, curse me, curse this Universe and Fate,
**** these feelings and this hunger I can't sate.
Aug 27, 2020
Aug 27, 2020 at 9:27 AM UTC