"fishhook" poems
Sweetly reaching for my hand
A rattlesnake curls up in yours.
Smiling oh-so-carefully
To hide your poison pellet
Delivered with a kiss.
Platitudes and honeyed words
With fishhook barbs inside them.
Lies disguised as candy bars
Offered out with sticky fingers
Mostly crossed behind your back.
Promising that all is peaceful
And there’s no danger to be seen.
Alarms and sirens drown those words
And say my world is burning here,
And sinking in a morass there.
If only words were scimitars
To slash a way to truthfulness
And cut the evil from the hearts
That proclaim love for one and all
And secretly deliver hate.
ljm
Feb 28, 2017
Feb 28, 2017 at 12:33 AM UTC
stay
fight
cataclysm
summary
resistant
eyebrow
crackle
dinner
fishhook
blunt
tribute
margarine
widow
****
scar
glory
elephant
planet
swallow
forget
blanket
fear
smooth
black
vent
curvy
translation
smooth
warrant
concussion
fluid
red
airway
postmark
testament
carpet
denial
flex
touch
real
married
armchair
sink
ebb
soft
touché
foam
stone
float
torn
away
see
tremor
marrow
bright
side
god
deep
hurry
inject
wither
moon
noun
full
stop
wild
year
done
everyone
enough
disco
skin
same
dream
chest
roses
proof
tacit
dire
soul
posit
wide
shy
city
run
Mar 19, 2013
Mar 19, 2013 at 11:52 AM UTC
Fusty walls and shadows
Left mice in the lurch
They said „no!“ to Kafka
On that day when a man in pajamas walked
In front of his house
And secretly eated
Fresh autumn grapes.
Boy with a fishhook and pieces of bread
Was hunting frogs near the coast
While Kafka went from door to door
People were offering him a glass of maple juice
Or just watched him in silence.
Shadows were whispering Judge's vanity name
And frogs were moving in the mud
Kafka’s leather bag
Went carried by a river
In searching for peace.
Sep 8, 2016
Sep 8, 2016 at 10:55 AM UTC
i. parts of my life are slowly blurring out of focus and i’m only left with the vision of an impaled heart on a fishhook. i want to quickly grow up, and yet i don’t. i dream of long train rides accompanied by good music and books, and dream of meeting the person who will morph to be the other half of my body. i store a jar of empty promises in my room and they are getting fuller as i meet more people. the irony is present.
ii. i’m sick of seeing art forms caressing glittery pretty words that hide the harsh world. i want to see more paintings of crying women, more baring of the inner souls, more bared ankles and twisted bones. i know the secrets you think you hide behind your tight jaws and everything boils down to nothing when atoms collapse upon each other and eyelashes are trimmed. there is something romantic behind skin on skin contact and fluttering eyelashes and i will stop at nothing to capture them in black & white.
iii. lessons on how to escape your body are filled with applications and i wonder where they want to escape to. bruised knees are tangled to the rhythm of church music as the professor reads page after page of rotting letters to a room full of skeletons. clear your throat and cobwebs in your heart, for spring is headed here and warm bread will soon take the place of cold carcasses & wilted flowers.
i shift in my grave.
Dec 15, 2013
Dec 15, 2013 at 1:27 PM UTC
Table,
My father and I sat
In our timeless silence
That brewed away beneath the lights
Like a sweat that never breaks.
Sister and the Stranger
Sat flanked by pillars,
With two full glasses of
Blood-lit wine
Simmering warmly like
Lamb's hearts
Dropped into bowls.
Never do I love my sister more
That when she wears that little fishhook
Of a smile,
A grim refusal of her lips to flicker down,
Making mincemeat of photographers,
Men in bad jumpers,
And garrulous psychopaths.
It was crueler than any frown.
Far more efficient.
The Stranger buttered her bread-roll all at once,
(A damning thing to do this afternoon)
And dinner turned to coffee
Without a hitch.
I noticed that the whole evening was
Done in a deliberately cut-glass way -
Two siblings painting themselves
Into the people they never wanted to be,
To make a bloody-minded point.
*She’s not one of us.
She’s nothing like us.
She’s nothing like mother -
Absolutely nothing like mother!*
And as we stood waiting for the car
My sister turned to me and said –
“I thought my expectations of daddy were low.”
She swiped at her flapper-girl haircut,
“Turns out my expectations
Have a basement.”
We only notice class
When we need to shut someone
Out.
We only notice class
When it's all we've got.
Oct 19, 2013
Oct 19, 2013 at 6:31 PM UTC
The newspaper called my father
a Tonsorial Expert and
a Smiling Gentleman
My father whose head is like
a Christmas tree lot on
New Year's Day and
whose mouth was like a rainbow
photographed in sixty-four shades
of gray but
that might have been my fault
even at six
that might have been my fault
He had done
a nice job of hairstyling
according to the pleased
customer, Mr. Holmes
just as he would do
a nice job of mopping floors and
a nice job of rewiring classrooms and
a nice job of growing weaker each day
growing hunched like an unused fishhook but
that might have been my fault
even now
that might have been my fault
Jul 22, 2011
Jul 22, 2011 at 4:34 PM UTC
Stop acting like you
are happy, I can see
your face when the mask
melts, when you think they
can't, and the far off look
in your eyes tugs
in my gut, a rusty fishhook pulling
me back to the you
no one else can see.
Feb 17, 2014
Feb 17, 2014 at 7:56 AM UTC
places where I worship
from the dark green church of my fascination with heavy frogs comes the **** body of a boy wearing the head of a heifer. his legs are not entirely under as of yet but he is let stumble. from the same dark an excessively wormed fishhook flies on a line and knocks the boy’s ******* behind like a bell. I scratch my fake arm from shoulder to elbow and believe the sound is not coming from the hook scraping back into the dark. even in dream I hallelujah lip synch.
places where I am discontent
in an abandoned dog’s house, I am, shoeless, with a slipper, in my mouth, a spotlight, caresses, dry grass, my mind, I mistake my mind, for the brain, cinerea, for cinema, my thoughts are meat, are herded, whipped at by a whipping tool, I fear nothing more than I fear, my ***** what it thinks of me, or that it thought, me, first, and lastly
beneath that whip, at the end of which, some interrogator’s, bulb.
Jun 7, 2013
Jun 7, 2013 at 1:51 PM UTC
Ecstatic in the sea breeze,
a magnanimous moment of
interloper pride ******* the day.
Uncoil—my heart, my chin,
my unglamorous abstinence
enforced by fear.
This is no lapse, but fury
and fortitude forging me
in the crucible of love.
Yet again I am up against it—
the stage of floating eyes and
overcooked feelings pawing
at my attention like
squids in a pool.
Ink and jelly in a room temperature soup
swirling and sloshing under
the authority of a rented room.
By gods, this time I’ll make it work—
plant leaves and blunderbusses
leaning against teal paint,
the sun really is on a fishhook.
Stand apart from me then and
judge the waters for what they are—
a storm too small to surface
in a sky too big to swallow.
I’m sweating in it
and the alarm clock is going off.
*bleet
bleet
bleet*
Too deep to turn back.
Too tired to go on.
This is where the end begins,
in the middle of it
with no ground at all.
Sep 3, 2025
Sep 3, 2025 at 7:47 PM UTC
i put on my sweatshirt, yoga pants, tennis shoes,
and said, "I think i'll go for a jog."
And I left. I ran down the driveway
I jogged round the turn,
I passed, on my way down the road,
a collar.
Pink, purple and small.
I took a break. Walked it off
That lost collar means a lost pet.
that lost collar might mean a lost kid.
I brushed it off.
Running across the bridge, I
told myself i couldn't stop, or
The eyes behind windshields would stare.
would realize im nothing.
I took the path along the river.
It was noticeably full and wide.
a dark, River green.
the current was strong and I
Followed it with the path
until i coudnt breathe. And
I told myself to get a rusty fishhook
carve my failure into my skin.
I told myself to ****
To **** myself.
To jump in the winter river,
to leap too far into the hypothermic current
to come back.
I sat on the edge for too long.
I went back home.
Jan 21, 2014
Jan 21, 2014 at 2:35 AM UTC
I've wandered that path,
And I beg you, please,
Go back.
Take the other path down the road.
Be stronger than I ever was.
Don't lock yourself down,
Once done it's almost irreversible.
Don't cause further damage.
Look at me.
I bear scars, bruises, broken bones.
All healed,
But none of them gone.
Needles, knives, razors,
I've even turned a boxcutter on myself.
A fishhook through the finger,
An exposed wire to the skin...
I've done it all.
And I tell you it's not worth it.
I'm going to tell you what no-one ever told me.
It gets better with hard work.
You're important.
You matter to a few people not pushed by pride.
Pain is not a release,
It is a bind.
A crutch.
Don't be like me.
You don't want to end up with shadows as your only friends,
And anger your only salvation.
Dec 21, 2016
Dec 21, 2016 at 12:46 AM UTC
The memory of pain,
forever etched like the cracks on a statue.
Remnants of a forgotten master, a dead king.
Visible historical lamentations,
so much clearer than simple memories.
A touch,
Digits entwined,
The proximity of two engines
As their gears turn, synchronized,
Soft, fragile, corruptible,
Yet dangerous, raucous, unheralding.
So strange to lose control.
The overpowering eagerness,
the invisible fishhook
reeling two flailing hearts
from the comfort of the sea.
And yet only the superficial wounds remain.
Worn like jewelry.
The softer scars,
the ones that heal.
Nov 14, 2011
Nov 14, 2011 at 3:42 AM UTC
He sets out from Cape Elizabeth on a little skiff
into the silvery Atlantic at dawn;
несчастливый, he whispers, and the salty wind
throws the word against a cliff.
His curse, he swears, is gone.
He dreams of fighting fish, of yellow fins,
of something more than mottled cod.
In afternoon, a bite: too strong to reel.
I’ll take you by surprise, the young man thinks.
He settles in and prays to God
that his fish will equal many meals,
that Gretzky will prevail at the rink.
I can pull you, fish, but I will let you tire.
He eats a bit of bread and takes a final look
into the deep.
The black of the sea meets the black of the sky;
the moon hangs, an empty fishhook,
and the young man holds the line and sleeps.
He’s awakened by a pull, a smack
of nose and bone against the stern;
she’s pulling further yet from shore.
Blood dripping, palms raw, he holds fast.
She’s still on the line. His feet stand firm.
Tomorrow, fish. I’ll wait one day more.
The next morning sees him rise,
prepared to fight.
You will come home with me today, fish.
In his weathered palms: the line.
Sun and salt and sweat collide
on bronze muscles blessed by Helios.
The fish responds right away:
she circles and he pulls, a deep-sea tango
until she’s there beside the skiff,
blue like tokens worn by brides on wedding days,
chain-mail sapphires with a sheen of gold:
a more beautiful adversary could not exist.
Regret set in. One of us must die today, fish.
She pulls him close; his hand lands on her fin.
Behind him, the harpoon, too far to reach.
One of us must die—I am not sure I care which.
His body is broken, somewhere within,
an injury he cannot treat.
*The Great One played with a broken rib in ’93.
I must be worthy of him.*
His bones cry and shriek, but he will not rest.
He plunges bleeding hands into the sea
And wrestles body and fin—
She presses against his breathless chest.
He pulls her nearer still,
Weapon at hand,
And as he is about to deliver the fatal wound
Her dark eyes ****
the need to prove his worth as a man.
His fingers drop the heavy harpoon.
*We are equals, fish; I cannot take your life.
I cannot sell your flesh.
I cannot catch you just to boast.*
He draws his rusty knife
but cannot bring himself to thrash
the rope that binds them both.
He sits down in the boat.
*Fish, take me out to sea.
Fish, it’s you and me.*
Mar 1, 2019
Mar 1, 2019 at 3:49 PM UTC
I have walked......
I have walked in the footsteps of dinosaurs
bruised and barbecued in the minds of generals
who strode the earth in the shadows
of empty politicians, who finally said:
I follow orders.
I have been trialled at Nuremberg
and World Courts by panels of learned men
who asked all the right questions but
were debated to defeat by fishhook questions
that derailed the course of justice by cunning
and unscrupulous men who decided
I was better alive than dead
by their careful questioning. Checks?
I have been at war with my neighbours
and nieces, friends and fraternity,
families and fence builders and all the while
I stayed indoors in my mind
and familiarity not asking for
redemption or resurrection
but tranquility.
I am human. Thats all it is.
Human.
Mar 17, 2014
Mar 17, 2014 at 2:11 AM UTC
I wonder if it might have been easier
For you to let go
If you’d just known:
I wasn’t in the process of loosing myself
But in the process of finding myself
Sure, I was on this road for hours
Before I felt like I’d moved
More than just one minute
From where I started
But somehow,
Sitting by a little lake,
And fishing without a fishhook
I finally got a bite
And I began to reel myself in
All of life
(Just a coming and going
From the house
Where I smoked a couple cigarettes
A couple months ago)
Conspired to let a few rocks fall
To the bottom of a river;
To finally let a little bit of water
Flow over this dam
And keep rushing onwards
Oct 29, 2013
Oct 29, 2013 at 10:31 PM UTC
He sweats in Nephilim
and has nightmares of little men named Dave
Life is the giant slayer
of the thirteen year old boy afraid to shower at the school gym
But that was long ago over many potholed highways of chance and circumstance
Today's pockets have fishhook's sewn in the threads , borne bare from reaching for too much and beyond
Delete my words of care and condemn them to your black hole of desperation
Eternal bound frauds cut the bubble wrapped dragons of division and petrify their legacy in granite monuments on lawns that never raised a leaf to this life
Oct 19, 2018
Oct 19, 2018 at 8:07 PM UTC
Your words are
A delectable fishhook
A chase
For the necessity
Of feeding
The heart
A punctured hole
In my cheek
You grab me
I can't squirm free
You tug the hook
From my mouth
And throw it back
For someone else
I'm just the catch of the day
Left with an everlasting scar
I swim away
Jun 20, 2013
Jun 20, 2013 at 11:21 PM UTC
I remember the fishhook incident,
it happened back in the
Vesper War,
a time of great apprehension,
especially for the Vespers.
And us veterans
will never,
we cannot forget
those ****** encounters
with our maker.
I am just glad I survived
& we never met.
May 2, 2014
May 2, 2014 at 10:36 AM UTC
I just might have to trip
To the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park today, I've longed for a good park experience lately, this place, a place of the Colorado desert of southern California, hot dusty climate, just might match my skin, or will it crisp my skin off my grainey bones, its open 9-5pm, I think I might be a naughty dotty and stay past park hours. Looking forward to the fishhook cactus, and the
Apricot Mallow's. A good trip for this man of old and hollow.
Sep 26, 2015
Sep 26, 2015 at 12:01 PM UTC
It shows itself in the mornings, too brisk to leave my bedroom;
soft tumblings in bed fighting to scrabble for warmth with a body like ice.
It shows itself in the lines and creases on my face;
prematurely carved in stone and worn rough with care.
It shows itself in the dreamy daze I wade through;
I stumble around you and on into some frightful collage ahead.
It shows itself in the strings unravelling behind me,
that you follow until you’re inside.
It shows itself in the pages of unseen messages you keep,
the ones you ignored or purposefully forgot, asking if we are ok.
It shows itself in the way I can never afford to be calm,
never around you at least.
It shows itself, the way it pummels and pounds the inside of my skull.
It shows itself when I can never sleep, like resting on a pillow of
broken glass.
It shows itself through my eyes;
the way they rest on the floor and silent tears
fall down around me, leaving silent stains that disappear before you notice.
It shows when I twist away from your lips,
but then instantly move to pull you close, on top.
It shows when I love you, and begin to let that fall from the window,
to somewhere else.
It shows when I learn how to love myself, then proceed
to wound and maim myself;
because I left you dangling on my line, my fishhook buried in your side.
There is a chaos.
Inside my head.
Are you prepared to face it?
It’s a raging ocean and you need to want to swim in the tides.
You need to know how to float on a sea of rubble, crushed up words,
sanded-down motivations and crashing waves.
It doesn’t soak you in salty coldness,
but the dark relief of being numb. No sensation.
Just observing the world from a tiny crack in the wall.
Are you alright, steeled enough, to try with me?
To brace against it all when I come tumbling at you from nowhere.
Are you strong enough to try and understand the chaos?
Aug 6, 2016
Aug 6, 2016 at 7:37 PM UTC
consider the inner stream
all that flows in you
all you hold true and hold yourself true to
desire, fear, and dream
the words and their copula
what you want to say
and what you will leave unsaid, to keep safe
hidden phenomena
the thoughts that ebb up against
all the things you saw
the grief, despondency, and joy they cause
and their consequence
the icons sunk and swimming
time, person, sense, home
nights alone, things for which you must atone
waters shimmering
those you loved and those you lost
those you won't let go
secrets you keep, emotions you won't show
gift, fishhook, cost
a thousand different currents
are pouring through you
memories, questions, laughter, light, heat, clues
your defeats and triumphs
a thousand confluences
baptised with your name
out from every corner of life they came
and found congruence
and you were once without form
but then you opened
to let in the dancing multitude whence
came your singular course
all flow with the inner stream
finds its source without
and all that flows would flow back out, no doubt
desire, fear, and dream
—
if ever you are lost
follow the stream
it begins with opening
and leads to the unknownness
that you didn't know you were looking for
all along
Sep 28, 2017
Sep 28, 2017 at 8:59 AM UTC
she
came into
my bedroom
holding
a fishhook
and a plastic glove
and
in her
calmest voice
explained that
yes
it would
have to
come out
that
mass of
shrimp
pulled
from deep within
my ear
******
left me
barren
and a little
giddy
but
there are times
when i still
feel
it pulsing
blue veins
tail flapping
scent of
algae
salt
my back
sprouts a fin
and the wound
heals
Sep 30, 2016
Sep 30, 2016 at 10:29 PM UTC
the fishhook plunges -
catches a big one, adrift;
the tension scales up.
Jan 21, 2025
Jan 21, 2025 at 8:39 AM UTC
The sides of my teeth
Are one bigger than the other.
Saturn mouth is this
Hardto extrapolate with
When I tasted
Soggy combination
We tied a ribbon.
My fleshy hands down your
Sides; its done.
Condensed milk it were
For the beacons I bowed
Curled to the side you
Is it good
Replacements, mirrors, echoed
Boxes: hot over hangings in my
Fishhook. I cant stop hurting
I cannot stop
Hurting my little loves.
My protectors.
She rocked me and took my milk.
Infused the dirt I had a muddy muddy
Wishes. The big rock
Hands placed silence in heart and leap I was always always fingers warped or
Wrapped into cloudy chalky bark.
Skin! She knows the cycles I was
Cyclical and unknown.
Little crossed out tiny
Arms of the creatures I knew to be me.
Jun 2, 2014
Jun 2, 2014 at 5:20 PM UTC