The Fish: The Magnificent Three Dozen

These purchased fish never had a chance:

sold as “feeder” fish they would have been

lunch for a turtle or something larger

than themselves in someone else's tank,

hiding from the lumbering monster

that would devour them with toothy mouth.

Three dozen came home on a small budget

from a filthy tank filled with the dead

sucked into the screen at the back

of an overcrowded pick-up racing through

a watery canyon of hell they never thought

they'd be a part of from the day of frydom.

In these first days of glorious frenzy in clear space

beyond their wildest dream should they have a dream

of something clean they swim in fifty-five gallons

of new, un-peed haven as it came from the well,

which sat for a week disgorging its chlorinated murder

before these little hearts burst racing glass to glass.

As it comes to all who trek across the filtered gravel,

death, dismembering, eaten, picked-at, broke-bellied,

they float lifeless beyond their mouth-chewed horrors.

What began as the Magnificent Three Dozen

has fallen into a single digit family pecking

black gravel in search of fallen, netted heroes.

Expectations of those beyond this page may demand

the poet make some comparison via metaphor

to their slippery lives as readers, blistering to and fro

in furious pursuit of bits of falling flake

that rain from a lighted sky as they dash to pluck

the tiny planks of life-giving sustenance from air:

To hell with that.

Barry G. Wick