"gills" poems
Soft melodies of the deep sea echo
Moonlight dances on my pretty scales
And icy bubbles whirl under my chest
Through my slippery hair
And down into my lungs to clear the way for overflowing foam
Laughter splashes behind my lips as my anticipation rises
Waiting for a night of twisted fairy-tales and uncalled for surprises.
Shimmering bodies swarm in spirals
Grinding in unison with the waves crashing at the surface
We're anxious for overflowing foam and hidden treasures
Purple light pierces the dark like shards of crystals
Casting a ghostly shade on bulbous faces
Pressure rises as each wave surges
Whirlpools of hot breath suffocate our gills
But the sidelines are shallow
And stragglers float motionless
Hair like seaweed at the nape of his neck
Unbuttoned linen soaked and dripping
Her hollow eyes glow green
Like the jelly orbs of a fish under florescent lights
She’s pressed against a boy who has hooks for fins
Searching for the parts that are edible
Tender, Scale-less, Slippery
Nothing wrong with being the catch of the day
Right?
Bubbles rise and pop as the last melodies drown
Schools of us are begging for shiny hooks and bad decisions
A handsome boy has been smiling all the while
He’s caught in a fisherman’s net
Craving salty lips and the spell to make him a man
But fisherman don't care for little mermaids
With hearts like sea glass and no hidden treasures to steal
Sweaty fins splash and cheer
The fishbowl shatters
Sea glass spills out onto sand
We squirm and flop onto land
Gasping without air to breathe
As our mouths and ***** thoughts dry in the sun
Leaving behind fresh meat without mouths to feed.
Rainbow confetti was stuck in the grooves of my scales
Wet clothes left on the floor of a steamy bathroom
Gasping and moaning into tile
With the face of a handsome stranger
Because this meat shouldn't go to waste
And I'm drunken with desperation
For overflowing foam, jewels, and shiny hooks
But I'm just another fish in the sea
Tumbling in the waves with my rainbow confetti scales.
Oct 15, 2018
Oct 15, 2018 at 6:00 PM UTC
You are my wind
You are my sun
The blood in my veins
The bones to make me stand
I've been drowning
And i thought you were my life raft
I thought you were my island
My safe place to escape
But turning away from the water
Won't make it go away
Running from the sea
Won't make it less deep
I've grown so used to finding my boat
So used to hiding from the tide
I panicked when it wasn't there
Has my boat sailed away?
The panic gave me a cramp
Tied weights to me
And I began to sink faster
How could my boat do this?
How could it sail away?
But the more I missed my boat
The more I needed it to stay
But not as safety
Not as refuge
But a love to share
And laugh and grow
I still need my boat
But not like I did before
No more hiding
No more dry land
I need to swim
Because boats are fun
And great for days
But the sea is a beast
That no boat can match
No she doesn't care that I'm a mermaid
Who fell in love with a fisherman
She doesn't care I've spent too much time on dry land
I forgot how to use my fins
A mermaid that can't swim
What a pathetic life it is
But she's cruel
She wont keep the boats around
So don't forget how to swim
Don't forget how to use your fins
We are strong us mermaids
Making deals with sea witches
Seducing men to their death
All fine folk tales
But you have to believe the myth
Always been strong
Because regardless of what Disney said
I can't grow legs
I'll always be a mermaid
But what use is it if I can't swim
When I learn how to swim again
I hope my fisherman will come back
I hope he hasn't sailed too far away
When I'm on deck of our boat again
We will dance and sing
Maybe have dogs
And flowers to remind us of land
A piano in the dining room
And guitars lining the walls
Music will echo
They can hear us from land
The happy fisher and his happy mermaid
Living together again
But storms always come
Because that's how nature works
It rains
It snows
It storms
Than the sun returns
This time when the storm comes
And makes waves that could touch the moon
And I get thrown overboard
I won't forget how to swim
I'll play with the fish
Make friends with sharks
And await the return of my beautiful fisherman
But you will always be my wind
My sun
The air in my lungs
But soon I will have gills
So I can breath when the water comes
You can't be my fins anymore
You can't be my dry land
You can't save me from drowning
Because mermaids are free
But if you want
You can be free with me
So please return my beautiful sailor
And we can live on our happy boat
And I'll be one with the sea
Because this sea is a part of me
Aug 18, 2014
Aug 18, 2014 at 11:39 PM UTC
Ah the perfect boy
Mushy and gushy, all human like, with normal human skin, and smile
Scratch that
Heavy body armor, brandishing a sword, born in the mid 15th century
Hmmm, no
Aluminim for hair, copper in his head, lack of understanding of any type of human emotions
That's not right, no
How about
Scales?
Not possible
Gills?
Smells fishy
A being of pure light energy?
Sigh, beyond my comprehension
I guess I'll just get
A pet rock
Jul 12, 2018
Jul 12, 2018 at 9:07 PM UTC
An ocean splashed the sky;
clouds little boats for angels to
reel in stars upon will; their gills
glow for human eyes to scope-out
and connect the dots, one by one.
The moon a forest for the alien
gophers; burrowing amongst its
craters, feasting on passing comets,
and yet; we fail to see.
A rainbow, for the giants after their
grievances, sprout a smile on
mile-long faces, as the days got harder
to stay sunny.
Drear for the shadows, the little
rats of the night, hissing at morn
and hurting, shrinking as
golden lasers black-
Feb 20, 2018
Feb 20, 2018 at 11:35 AM UTC
We are sands astride and in the tides
Waters which tare us from both sides
Passion and fury
Duty and honor
Pushes us in
And pull us out
Love to hate
Pushes us in
And pulls us out
The desire for domesticity
And the desire to be free
Pushes us in
And pulls out
Till we are bludgeoned
By the flotsam
Tangled in the terrible debris
Battered by the violent sea
No more you than I am me
And I wish I had the gills to breath
Before those tides overwhelm me
Nov 29, 2014
Nov 29, 2014 at 12:46 PM UTC
we can all pretend we’re perfect
that church ain't worth it
that drugs and alcohol make us worthy
wait
worthy of what a debate?
so what’s on your plate?
nothing but emptiness and hate
and that’s great
at least i know why you treat me this way
so here’s to saying i’m no different
drugs and alcohol
i’m with them
and i can’t change even if i tried
but wait
what do i have to change
you don’t even know me
but you pretend i’m the only one who’s gone through the worst
me?
i’m flattered but
you see
i’m just a stereotype
trying to get past
but i get beat down by the headlights
i’m a drive by
trying to drive by my future
but i can’t
because my past is trying to tell me that i’m horrible
but i can’t
i can’t stand that people try to tell me who i am
i can’t stand that i’m horrible
for telling you who i am
and on land
i’m a bad influence
but in water
i’m the man
you don’t understand
that i’m a fish trying to find it’s way in the ocean
and those mistakes
are just my gills
i breathe them in and stop breathing
because someone is always pulling me out of water
it’s like the Mexican border
Protected by what's within
it’s a sin
for me to be where i’m supposed to be
but see
it’s not me
it’s the stereotype
and its trickery
it makes you think that you know me
but what you don’t see
THAT’S NOT THE WORST THING THAT’S HAPPENED TO ME
so let me be
let me speak
i have to get it out of me
that hate in my gills shouldn't be there when i breathe
so go ahead and stereotype
but i’m not the only one who has to get something off my chest
but i’m the best
because I've made it through every test
and though you think you can bring me down
I've made it through every test
so let me speak before you think i’m just the same as the rest
Apr 24, 2014
Apr 24, 2014 at 8:52 AM UTC
as a Pisces, I am swimming upstream,
the salmons last run.
fighting, pulling to grip those soft
rocks beneath.
those beasts that keep some stuck.
salmon are based in diversity
needing to have a wide gene
pool, as their kin die quickly
from those rocks.
getting stuck, swimming around and around…
insanity defined,
and time doesn't stop.
so, to the work.
swimming up stream,
dedicated to being a mother.
creator, incubator.
children
stored in the belly of the beast.
preparing to break free,
be set alive, to roam free.
the wombs embrace,
the face of LOVE.
currents of the calls
are so loud, rushing past my gills.
I feel the whooshing sound,
the pressure bearing down, taunting
me out.
calling me out… are you sure,
are you confident?
constant tests to check
and check and check for missteps.
ones that feel out of step.
no more time for those.
the path is clear,
yet
the water is cold,
bearing down on my scales built,
molded for this.
built in this system of birth and death.
choosing each step from above.
below, here I feel at home and
I feel ME breaking out.
she's broken out, there will be clouds,
rain, thunder all the things.
let
it be.
and the beast is free, she
has descended, dug down deep,
anchored, prepared for reception.
just like the trees, they grow so well
with others.
interdependently nourishing the diversity.
Feb 5, 2016
Feb 5, 2016 at 5:34 AM UTC
When they get to the aquarium, the kid asks if they have a Great White shark exhibit.
The volunteer says no, we don’t.
The kid asks, “Why? are you afraid he might try to eat people?”
The volunteer chuckles at this and tells him no. no aquarium has successfully held a Great White shark live for more than a few days.
You see, in order to stay alive, Great Whites and other sharks, like hammerheads, swim on their own continuously through the ocean, never stopping, never slowing, tramping a perpetual journey with many miles to go before they finally reach “sleep”. If they stop, the oxygen rich water around them no longer flows over their gills and into their bodies and they suffocate from the strain of being at rest. So they keep going, like lost children searching for their parents in a very large amusement park.
This need to keep moving, this need for space, has made it extremely difficult to keep them in our meager glass human death cages. When the Monterey bay aquarium managed to capture a juvenile that didn’t thrash itself to death like the adult sharks they netted before, it bashed its head against the tank’s sturdy walls until the shock of being dragged out of its home and put in the equivalent of a coffin killed it.
But, the volunteer continued cheerfully, we have other kinds of sharks here. We have zebra sharks, which don’t need to swim nonstop. In their natural habitat, they just lie on the ocean floor all day. The kid agrees to go see them
The zebra sharks are not lying on the floor nor do they look like zebras. They swim slowly past him, leopard spots dotting their ridges on their backs, their fins, their long tails. “They’re called zebra sharks because of the zebra like patterns of the juveniles,” the volunteer explains. The ones we have here are adults.When they become adults, they get the spots and those ridges you see. Sometimes people mistake them for leopard sharks, which are a totally different species.”
The kid stares at the zebra sharks for a full ten minutes, looking for a sign of resignation at being called something they weren’t anymore, at collectively being referred to by a childhood nickname they had long outgrown. They did not seem to care.
He gets bored and goes to other exhibits, the split fin flashlight fish blinking on and off in their darkened tank, the touch pool, the medusa jellyfish with their trailing tentacles. But the sharks are what he remembers when he leaves, and they’re what he remember when he returns three months later, six months later, two years later, three, five, ten, this is what stays with him, the sharks in our tanks and the sharks in the ocean.
Jun 16, 2017
Jun 16, 2017 at 2:20 AM UTC
She is so weird
She is so weird
She is so weird
The other girls all float around with their eyes painted like cats,
Rounded with black and flicked up at the end, but she
Swims with
her eyes painted like fish
One little flick down
One little flick up at the
End and
The other girls whisper about her
Saying
She is so weird
She is so weird
she is so weird
because
She has watercolor lips
In pretty shades of pink
Not sharp
And
Red
Like the other girls
She is not a collection of edges and shadows, she is
Soft and
She is so weird
She is so weird
She is so weird
She looks dreamy
And sometimes
Confused
The other guys whisper that
There is
Not much there
In her head
And that
she is So weird
She is so weird
She is so weird
She has three black lines embedded in the
Side of the
skin on her neck
Stacked like deep
Vs lined under
Each other and once I asked her
If they were birds in flight
Or gills
And she laughed
It wasn’t cruel
She pulled me close
And whispered both
With a smirk
And then she smiled wide
And shook her head and told me
That
I Am so weird
I am so weird
I am So weird
And though I knew it was an insult
When the cats whispered it
It wasn’t one when it came from the fish
Apr 20, 2016
Apr 20, 2016 at 1:58 AM UTC
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green **** hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
4.2k
I.
I'm a growing polliwog,
not a butterfly--
pickled legs hang off of my fish body
and gills close off so rapidly.
A minute ago I could caress the water
and make oxygen bubble in my throat. Now
beating,
pulsing
lungs intrude
like pink bubble gum ready to pop.
What a sadistic word,
oxygen.
II.
After a little nap in a sleeping bag
butterflies are monarchs,
stained glass fluttering perfection,
symbols of luck,
symbols of
beauty,
Their wired bodies are scribbled together
like starving supermodels.
III.
And my seams are
!slowly!
pinching themselves open,
a la Frankenstein.
I want to think these body parts are mine:
A tentative nose,
very green pointillism eyes
with lashes like brittle grass or bent nails,
These white playdough thighs,
and stretchmarks like remnants of lace
chewed up by my insane canine.
Pink.
Dainty and tangled on my legs,
I think they look like jet-streams lit by sunset.
Mar 4, 2012
Mar 4, 2012 at 9:39 PM UTC
Something don't feel right
something is coming down
something going on below
something...
has all gone wrong
and the bomb is about to blow
mankind went after nature
and thought he won the race
but the verdict coming in is
that we're all headed
for death row
now we all are wearing
masks of ignorance
pretending we didn't know
it was gamble every time
we picked between two evils
to lead us down
our long descent
we like to blame the snake
for all the fruit we poison
but we knew all along
we were sleeping
with the devil
while dressing up like sheep
ba ba the witch is dead
don't you remember
we bunt her for our sins
and ate all of her children
because we feared
they were descendants
of the wolf
yet we still think
we hold the blessing
of the glory of some god
as if our acts of treason
against the higher power
have gone unnoticed
our hands may be clasped
in prayer
but behind the curtain
we're watching war
fist **** mother nature
like a *****
imaginary lines divide us
from one another
as we volunteer to spill
each others blood
until the oceans overflow
with all our spoiled milk
the coastline is moving in
and Noah can't build an ark
big enough for our ego
we're going to have to start
believing in evolution
because we're going to need
some gills
and hope Atlantis is kinder
to us than we have been
to each other
Jul 7, 2018
Jul 7, 2018 at 7:09 AM UTC
I have locked myself inside of my car in the middle of the school parking lot.
I can still hear the ringing of the bell that caused us to scatter out of the school like ants escaping from a disrupted colony ringing in my ears. I am no longer a fire ant, but a caged animal, and I’m not sure who the metal barrier around me is supposed to be protecting. I still don’t feel safe.
I am thinking about how the glass at the zoos muffles the sounds of the animals, and how you might miss their cries unless you stopped walking and got right next to the glass. I don’t want to be seen, but, at the same time, I am hoping and waiting for people to stop walking past me, stand next to my car, and listen.
I am laying down in my back seat like a wounded animal, and my screams are being muffled by me burying my face into the seat. I no longer feel like a caged animal, but a fish inside of a tank. I don’t know how long I have been crying, but I feel like I am drowning. You can’t hear noises in the water unless you are below the surface yourself. I feel like I am the exhibit in the aquarium that everyone ignores because whatever’s in the water is hiding under a rock.
My head feels as though it will explode, I can’t breathe, everything is blurry, my chest hurts, I can’t stop crying, and I have convinced myself that I am dying. When my cousin was three, he would have died if my dad had not performed cpr on his blue, limp little body after he was pulled out of the pool. Now, he is eleven, and he knows how to swim, but I don’t have the heart to tell him that you don’t need water to drown.
Now, I am wishing that I had been the one that drowned that day.
I am sitting in a fish tank, I have no gills and I can not breathe.
My screams are silent, nobody can hear me, and I am kicking the inside of the car to try and make some noise, but everyone has gone home by now.
I am able to breathe again and I have grown a pair of lungs.
I am sitting in a zoo after closing hours, and all I can do is practice my roar and try to be heard again in the morning.
Jul 29, 2018
Jul 29, 2018 at 8:04 PM UTC
fragile umbrellas are strewn
across the cluttered forest floor,
nourishing strong connections
from all over the world.
their gills are loaded weapons
that fire spores into the air
at the speed of light.
if we blink, we miss it -
and the umbrellas multiply.
Apr 24, 2022
Apr 24, 2022 at 12:50 AM UTC
Will it help?
If dams are made out of handkerchiefs
to hold floods of sufferings and griefs.
Will it help?
If murmurs are subdued within glasses of loyalty
to wash away the sins of ancient royalty.
Will it help?
If we break all ancient walls
to break barriers between hearts, wide and tall.
Will it help?
If we make some ground in oceans mixing 'self respect' and 'ancient sins'
or learn how to survive in waters without gills and fins.
Will it help?
If progeny is punished for their inherited guilt
and each drop of brutal blood is spilt.
Will you promise?
Then you will again find no reasons to divide
and live without any quarrel happily, satisfied.
I doubt!
As it has nothing to do with 'ancient walls' or 'ancient sins'.
It is something related to species and has nothing to do with genes.
Nov 11, 2014
Nov 11, 2014 at 9:24 PM UTC
I'm in a 60mph funnel
everything going on around me
forces me to stand still
and pushes me into the center of a typhoon
that'll drown me until I grow gills
Dec 3, 2016
Dec 3, 2016 at 7:52 PM UTC
What could be worse
Than a garden
Full of gnomes and trolls?
Is it:
Lawn jockeys and yardells;
Chuck adjusting his carb every Sunday afternoon;
Bathtub ****** Marys beseaching us to love;
Metal flowers on outside garage walls;
Fish ponds with gills in the filter;
Red gravel flowerbeds with little white fences;
Cosmetic door knockers;
Swimming pools without diving boards;
Mirrors on fences;
Burning ******* in fire pits;
Backyard landfills;
Icicle lights;
Weedy neighbours and an east wind;
The screech of tires;
The thump of metal;
The sound of screaming;
The absence?
Yeah. Plenty could be worse.
Jan 5, 2015
Jan 5, 2015 at 4:25 PM UTC
A decade of trains that lost track
have just turned up in my esophagus,
they are all bile as I am all hands.
This is why I was never frightened by ghosts
and sea specters:
they have been inside of me
the whole time.
Sometimes, hot coal would hit my cuticles,
I could see the steam.
I could feel something like wheels
spinning a web on my nail-beds;
something sat in me like I were a flowerpot.
All that remained were the sticks
of my skin, blood bubbling from below.
But they have been there
the whole time.
I have been a ship in a bottle,
I have been a conductor without knowing.
Fever outlined my spine with its fingers
and I felt I was being kicked by
a fetus.
I was a hallway for phantoms
that believed they still have their limbs
and if not, quills
or a fish with gills and a fin
or locomotive. Mechanical movement still.
How could I not realize
they were inside of me the whole time,
soaking up the nutrition from my throat
shifting the razor while I shave?
Thousands of train-ghosts
crawled from me by an engine of *****
Not one knows where they are.
Apr 15, 2013
Apr 15, 2013 at 1:27 PM UTC
On occasion,
I dream about drowning at least once a week
And when I drown
I always expect to choke under the pressure of the ocean
That the salt stings my eyes shut
But I am always surprised at how easily my body sinks
And how buoyant it can be under water
And it makes me think of all the slaves
Who threw themselves overboard
How they thought themselves fish before slave
Did they grow gills?
Were they grateful for the mercy of erosion
Under salt instead of whips
Did they backs bend like dolphins do?
Did they build an underwater city untouched
By brutal hands
Do they know, that I see them sometimes
The ancestors who chose water over land
And they are not bone and marrow stacked
At the bottom of the ocean
They are not corpses who chose the easy way out
I see them
They have built an underwater world from their bare hands
They laugh and bubbles exit out their mouths
Even now my family would not mourn my departure
If I were to be called by the waves
For the water has a language that some
Of us have an ear for
It is not the place of mortals to tear up
When one of us africans drown
Because to sink is to find new life
Is to be in the hands of those who control their own destiny
I know them, the water people
They call me during the night
And i don't fight anymore
I laugh with them, and live
And wake angry that oxygen can suffocate me
That I suddenly become flailing fish
That my home is not this land
That I find comfort in ocean floor
That is where my ancestors speak to me
Console me
Teach me the ways of spiritual healer
At the bottom of the sea
And it is not a dream although I wake from it
It is a reality that is bestowed upon
The xhosa shamans from birth
The western world does not have a reality like that
So they will argue it does not exist
They will be quick to diagnose my mental health
Call the act of reuniting with my own
An episode, a stress indicator
A sleeping pill prescription
These are the same people who believe in
Three day resurrection for death
But cannot fathom an african never dying
And we don’t die
We do not die.
There is life for us elsewhere.
And when we are ready
The waves will welcome us home.
Apr 29, 2016
Apr 29, 2016 at 5:50 PM UTC
It seems you were always a boat
A source of relief while I drown
We sailed in the sun
Drift in the breeze
But somehow I fell overboard
And you kept drifting without me
Oh please don't let me drown
I'm choking
My eyes are burning from the salt
Just throw me a ******* rope
Aug 16, 2014
Aug 16, 2014 at 9:32 PM UTC
Pluck one fat orange body from the water
Slippery fins pinched between finger and thumb
Wiggling, wriggling struggling for life
Pointless life with a five second memory
Fat drops of water leave trails across the counter top
Plop, let it fall onto the plate
Gills flexing
Mouth agape
Open, close
Blank eyes stare upwards
Watching reflected light from the water ripple on the ceiling
The first thing to be spooned out
Spread over fresh toast
Like butter before jam
Goldfish on top of eye jelly
Fat orange body still wiggling
Wriggling, struggling for that pointless life
A five second memory
Gills still flexing
Mouth moving slowly
Open, close
Empty eye sockets now watching nothing
Still staring in mute horror
How strange
I hear no one questions
No gasping people with pointing fingers
Screams of horror as they flee
Nothing...
No one cares
About goldfish on toast
Mar 23, 2012
Mar 23, 2012 at 6:15 PM UTC
we all have sorrows as deep as wells,
but i'm tossing them right out the door.
maybe this is where i shed my old skin like a cobra,
but i'm hardly as vicious.
i'm only as dangerous as you let me be,
with my bones as strong as glaciers and
my eyes could swim inside aquariums
or the Mediterranean sea,
like i have gills that could let me breathe.
i could make a home,
20,000 leagues under or i could
touch land with my sun shining shades
of affections
with the complexions of new worlds.
and did you know, that there are more stars
in our galaxies than there are particles of
sand on each coastal line -
i guess you can say we learn something valuable
when you least expect,
like how cats have one hundred vocal sounds and
we can relate because
our vocal sounds
are endless. we can use our voices.
kind of like our opportunities,
expanding like water turning to ice on our
puddles so we can walk on them without
rain boots or umbrellas that catch our tears.
instead, we wear our thickness overlapping
our feelings and
i just want to be naked.
if that leaves me vulnerable,
so be it as long as i can taste the glass half full
on my skin.
i just want to be happy.
Mar 17, 2011
Mar 17, 2011 at 2:01 PM UTC
There's a stream,
splashing and gurgling,
sending up in the air a single bead of water,
sun beams giving a lightbulb's twinkle
and inside lying fragments of it's history,
I wonder if it has a tomorrow
As I daydream about it's mysteries;
The path down the stream,
taken within the flow
with other waters,
weaves,
in and out of the gills of a baby minnow,
over and through smoothed rocks,
Seeping from a canal
racing through locks,
drifting down straights with no bends
Left from the **** of a stag weekend,
And before that a can of cider,
and before that a tube in a mechanical assembly line,
from a water tap,
that came from a reservoir,
Which fell from clouds above it's perimeter,
and before that splashed from ocean froth,
lifted up in a collision of waves like a table cloth
after being taken on the hull of a speed boat
carrying ******* from a river,
where it had once briefly been on a paddle
from a man fishing to make his living.
And further up the river where it divides into streams and then nothing,
and then famine,
moist ground from tears,
It had been someone suffering.
A million lives
entwined in a drop of water,
each one a coincidence,
coinciding just by chance
the spectrum of it's experience of us is wide,
and with each and every drop the water empathised,
Tears at a wedding,
At a funeral,
Christmas spirit in mulled wine,
A plume of sea water from the belly of a jellyfish,
Pushed forward through it's life,
A trillion drops of water helping to make gravity decide
How high or low to go to make the tide,
Unified in direction
helped by the sun's and the moon's light,
Does it take the love of one direction (not the band)
to be unified?
Jul 15, 2013
Jul 15, 2013 at 8:35 PM UTC
He was known as the local Mycophagist
In the dales, the woods and the hills,
What happened was sad, for he wasn’t so bad
Just a tad underdone, Toby Gills,
They say that the cord was around his neck,
He was born with a carroty mop,
And a pale white head, he was almost dead
When the doctor had called out ‘Stop!’
They cut the cord and they let him breathe,
The damage was already done,
The blood had been stopped to his carroty top
So they said that he’d always be dumb.
But he found a niche where the fungi creeps
And went out collecting the spore,
In a year or two he knew more than you
And the college Professor next door.
He studied his mushrooms with loving intent,
He knew about hen of the woods,
He knew about bracket and shaggy manes, magic
And paddy straw, they were the goods;
He fostered his lobster and hedgehog and oyster
And coral fungi and stinkhorns,
But didn’t discern between fly agarics
And toadstools that grew in the lawn.
He grew his spore in a deep, dark cellar
And sold to the folk who came by,
And never would judge between Widow Weller
And the ordinary witches of Rye,
He’d sell death caps, and pigskin puffballs
Not thinking to question them why,
Or who would be eating his laughing Jim’s
And whether they knew they would die.
The air was thick and the air was damp
And he fell in the dark one day,
Scattering toadstools into the air
And their spores had floated away,
He breathed the spores right into his lungs
For he hadn’t been wearing a mask,
But ****** them in right over his tongue
And they came to his lungs, at last.
I happened to see him out in the street
He was finding it hard to breathe,
He could only take a couple of steps
Then sit on the kerb, to heave,
I tried to help but he waved me away
And his eyes were yellow and cruel,
Then I saw what he’d thrown up on the kerb
Some yellow and red toadstools.
The man was a walking toadstool spore
They were popping up out of his hair,
Pushing their way though his carroty top
In a bid to get to the air,
And his skin was blotched like a puffball, he
Looked up at me, and he cried,
As a giant toadstool grew from his throat
And he lay on his side, and died.
David Lewis Paget
Dec 7, 2013
Dec 7, 2013 at 5:22 AM UTC
My younger brother still fishes
when he can, when the weather
is agreeable, when he can afford
some tackle and beer for the cooler.
He sits alone on the river bank
and smokes and drinks and waits
in the shifting shade of cottonwoods
for the unmistakable pull on the line.
He fishes whether
the fish are biting
or not. He is intimate with
psychology and the placid
deceit of undisturbed water.
My brother is an angry man.
As kids, we fished
together on the dock
and killed them
with our hands.
Careful not to kneel
on scattered hooks,
we baited the lines
on our knees a foot
above brackish water.
We dropped fish heads
off the edge of the dock
and watched them float
down, almost out of sight,
settling into final stillness
only to snap back to life
(or the false throes of death)
by the white claws of *****
picking them into oblivion—
goodbye eyes,
goodbye gills,
goodbye teeth,
goodbye scales.
Brother, I don’t remember anymore:
was it triumph or merely shame
that left us shivering in the sun?
Mar 31, 2017
Mar 31, 2017 at 1:03 PM UTC