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Thank you to those who support me via my Paypal account: rikwrybac@yahoo.com. The government doesn't read my poetry. You do. Out of over 560 poems here on this blog by me, I hope you find one or more you like. Thank you for my readers. Thank you for your comments.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

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

Rant

Now that you've been lulled to sleep by piles of puppies and the antics of cats, please remember that people are being murdered on the streets and in jails by your employees who are supposed to serve and protect; that you've been poisoned by corporations for profit, irradiated since childhood by government nuclear tests mostly under the direction of corporations for profit; that you've been forced to pay for wars over the control of oil for super market bags and gas for your automobile; that soldiers aren't defending the Constitution when they're killing at the behest of corporations in another country for the control of precursors for plastic bottles; that you've been lied to by politicians over and over who blame and shame some other group of people in order to get your vote so they can take graft and feel powerful; that somewhere children and adults need food that is being thrown into dumpsters at your local supermarket; that people who speak up about these problems are vilified and demonized by large media corporations; that somewhere, someone is making news that doesn't rate the attention of the News At Six news teams; that you are blind to the words of poets and soothsayers who speak truth to power; that you are lulled to sleep by piles of puppies and the antic of cats so you'll forget everything you've read here...and much more that needs your attention.