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
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