Words by Nahum Gale
Feature image by Angela Compagnone
my mind is a fish bowl / an aquarium whirlpool, compounding miniature maelstroms of raging tides / violent caressing’s of the glass walls and barnacles suckling chill panes / and a great pain would sweep over in ocean waves / with a rusted anchor, in chains, and harnessed to my membrane, plummeted / deep below, (deep, deep, deep below) where the goldfish flowed / a cavernous hold, where sealions would stray far from home / and the only blood was cold and blue / and the hearts of one octopi beat hourly for I / I and all / all under pressure from the great absent deep / the black hole trench that swallowed us, a single piece / a migraine clutch on the metal tin can of a submarine, leagues alone / alas, he was alone / lost at sea / the lonely submariner, kid scuba diver who resembled a far off astronaut / too far gone, with the glow worm stars, running milky ways through tremor currents / and a chemical reaction ushered somewhat a slow sinking / down to a seabed that seemed almost infinite / and a silver pool of misplaced oxygen dripped back to the surface / torn away from the bronze sphere of one oxygen mask that eroded so clear and so so / and it was so hard to breathe / it was so hard to breathe / so hard to see those goldfish, up there in them reeds, were jaguar sharks / appraising a life aquatic / more-or-less, a victory rose / dribbling down a vast puddle / something you could call the transatlantic cosmic / or simply a fish bowl / so simply a fish bowl / with a crack crying down its walls / as I hoped so desperately to escape it’s suffocating hold / it’s winterish cold and lack of an end / its lack of an end / its lack of an end / its lack of an end / its lack of an end / its lack of … / pardon me / pardon me and my stream of consciousness as it yet again flows down into the sea / I see it now, the stream / the stream from iris taps / left on over midnight, so they trickle down to the bowl / and overflow / oh dear one, they overflow / and it felt good to see it leak / see the fishbowl shattered, before it did so / because my room was not built for the sea / and, I thought this all, laying quietly on my linen seabed / listening to whale songs, the echoes of samskeyti / like a sonar, crying to the blue / and the blue drowning it all
This poem was originally published in Edition 35 of Verse. View it in its original PDF form via ISSUU.
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