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Joy Jan 2020
The fish bowl is yet to make sense.
I’m that little red fish
at the bottom of the glass aquarium
you barely remember
from that childhood cartoon
that maybe never existed.

I’m not a pretty fish,
let’s at least admit that.
I’m not a goldfish,
or a rainbow mermaid,
or a toad the prince could kiss
to turn into a princess.
I’m a red pufferfish.

I’m puffing up and I poison these waters.
Like all scared pufferfish,
I dread facing up to my insecurities.
I never trusted my mind was whimsical enough,
that my skin was pretty enough,
that my spikes were safe enough,
for anyone to love them.

And what is a scared pufferfish to do
but to retrieve to the comfort
of painting the pictures of who they want to be?
What am I to do but to lie?

So, I, the pufferfish, lie.
I lie like my life depends on it,
I turn trickery into art.
I become such a good liar that soon,
no one, not even me,
can tell the difference between
the real situation,
and the fantastic tales I tell myself.
Isn’t it a tiny bit ironic?
Being so afraid of the sting,
that the pufferfish resources to clouding the water
with poison so much
that she poisons herself and doesn’t know
which way in the bowl is up.

The trap of the lying pufferfish
is that not even in lies may she succeed.
Even in lies she loses the game she tries
so desperately to cheat.
You see, it’s a little bit like this,
if you are a pufferfish,
and you don’t believe they’re interesting enough,
and you paint them to look like dolphins,
because everyone loves dolphins,
the pufferfish ends up feeling like an impostor.
No matter what lies she tells herself or others,
she’s smart enough to know in her gills
that she is, in fact, a pufferfish.

However,
should you hold up
the fishbowl
to the light
you’ll see that
underneath the layers of paint
and red skin
my little lying pufferfish heart
is transparent,
in a way,
clean.
I swear,
in all the honesty
you shouldn’t trust,
that I mean no harm
and never had.
And please,
little,
transparent
pumping,
scared heart,
believe yourself,
when you say,
that you are trying
as hard as you can,
at having a fresh start
in the poisoned waters.
Ira Desmond Dec 2018
Last night,
I dreamt that the friend of a friend had died.

His body floated lifeless on the surface of the Pacific,
tossed about between the Bering Sea whitecaps

like an orca’s seal-pup plaything
while the Arctic wind whipped

and beat the freezing cold water
across his pallid face and through his chestnut hair.

Then his body
began to sink,

its silhouette appearing
against various monotone

canvases of blue
on its trip downward:

a vivid cornflower,
a pelagic cerulean,

a chasm of cold cobalt,
a starless twilight,

a forest of indigo,
a velvet curtain of navy.

Finally,
as it reached the deepest possible shade of midnight—

only a quantum away from black—
it stopped sinking.

There, in that void,
where daylight and color are considered but outlandish theories,

strange fish of all and shapes and sizes
began to surround the decomposing corpse:

Greenland sharks hailing from the frozen arctic,
mantis shrimp from the mangrove labyrinths,

eyeless electric eels from undersea caves near the Galápagos,
vampire squid rising cautiously up out of their World War One trenches,

scores of spindly ***** and pale worms that had ventured far beyond
the safe familiarity of their alien geothermal worlds.

At first, they approached the corpse gingerly,
nibbling only the tips of its hair and fingernails,

and then suddenly, voraciously,
they consumed it—until not even a skeleton remained.

Now, only a single point of light was left
there floating in the void.

And from this single point of light,
where just a moment before the corpse had floated,

a brilliant white lattice structure emerged,
unfurling as would a fern across a forest floor.

It fanned out onto the seabed
and then swept upward, upward

back toward those reaches of sea
where color is known

and fresh air gleefully permeates
that foamy outer membrane that skirts the base of the sky.

Scores of familiar fish began to lift up the crystalline structure—
schools of shimmering sardines,

stately, dignified manta rays,
skipjacks, bluefins, and white-tips,

brilliant cuttlefish, humble pufferfish,
shifty barracuda, gargantuan whale sharks,

all of them
beating their tails in concert

to carry this lattice away,
this measure of a life,

this husk of a soul
at last freed from its earthly bindings.

The fish were carrying it somewhere deeper,
somewhere darker,

to a place that I understood—
even from the inky depths

of my dreaming mind—
that I could not enter.

But then again,
I knew that someday

I would.
Seán Mac Falls Feb 2013
Schooled in crass vanity,
Pointed scales of pufferfish,
Blowing up themselves.
most poisonous fish
shark are immune from poison
of the pufferfish
Omnis Atrum Jul 2018
We stood alone in the lowest point of an empty pool
the same one that used to be filled with cool, restorative waters
I still carried the lacking waters within me daily like a pufferfish
thinking I could restore the oasis that once kept us from drying out.

The words used to taste so sweet when they passed across my tongue
in the days when they traveled to your ears by the silver cord that bound us
and flowed through them to the mirrored soul that awaited them longingly
but now they taste of carrion baking during countless summer days.

As soon as my lips parted to refill the pool so that we could reach the ladder
I dropped to my knees and the corrupted sentiment started pouring out
the vile and viscous remnants were colored a sickly shade of green
and they escaped with such a force that they pushed us both backwards.

When the words first started spewing I felt each one fully
with the same vibrations as when they were first taken captive
but their ******* coated my tongue so that I could taste nothing
except for the desire to find the ladder and leave all of this where it fell.

I searched for the beauty I remembered for as long as any mortal could
and I glanced back one last time to make sure you did not linger in it
I took each step towards the hill I swore I would die on
and the oozing corruption left a trail of footprints that would never be followed.

The hill that I sat on for countless summer days was no longer there
and I remembered the fire lanterns that were carried on the wind
what we were had disappeared beyond the clouds and fallen
sinking to the bottom of the depths to never be sought or found again.

I used to fear the emptiness that might replace this when I let it go
but it is as calm and soothing as the waters we used to swim in
and I had almost forgotten the whispers of the soul of the world
until I heard “you loved her as much as you could for as long as you could,

it is done”.
no spine?
that's what replays
through your mind?
let me give you
more ammo
for sleepless nights
anyone can see through you
when you walk around
and act dead
wake the **** up
nothing is working out for me!
oh-uh, yea, i guess i did spend
all my money
i know the radiator is broke
but look! corset, boots, smoke
at least i can pretend
everything is okay
even if no one believes me
even if everything is falling
apart
try not to ignore.

you have been right

so many times before.



sbm.



{talking to the bear}



daily post – qualm



#itrhymes!

#pufferfish

#warhat
mq Oct 2020
In January there is a glow so gold that the bleak post-summer sky turns white
The Sun squints through stretches of clouds that hang over the Indian oceans
The Atlantic seas where the carp shiver and the trout bloat like flattened pufferfish
They sit between the edges of costal towns, like a hanging curtain pinned down by old wooden sea ports
Splintered and bruised by the ocean’s fierce love
By the fisherman’s tools
By the many boats of history, present and future
By the weary ropes that curl, like snakes, into spirals on the deck.
In January there is a glow so familiar and unchanging, like
Water finding the foot of the sandbank
Over and over and over.
MW ©
Third Eye Candy Oct 2018
i was born when the nothingness had grown weary of my absence called upon to blunder through mortality's purpose
swollen like a pufferfish in a pond of mercury
so gorgeous everything’s okay.
after that, i was born again but not from love’s Freudian vendetta with eternity.
but from an organic siege of my previous incarnation,
born from a wound in the guitar buried in the garden.
i never leave anywhere the same as not being there actually.
i absolutely almost there
at all..
Johnny Noiπ Mar 2019
The Cultural Industry of Einstein is Still Stupid

Quick, Unquestionable
cut of ****** colors of spring
to find a list of Architects in Rome
to serve fugu to; scary Still. St. atws
***** and square Japanese magazine
for a certain video, Barbie believes
that, in general, the image of the lady
changes. That fasting is the servant
of your country, according to the letter
is to be belle; To obtain the celestial
fragrance of the Garden of the Masters,
the course that I have finished on the
sacred ****** and those who spread
to Rome, getting rid of the ******,
the king of the palace of spiritual light
in the world took refuge in a fogou.

A fogou or fougou is an underground,
dry-stone structure found on Iron Age
or Romano-British-defended settlement
sites in Cornwall. The original purpose
of a fogou is uncertain today.

The fugu in Japanese, bogeo
or bok in Korean, and hétún
in Standard Modern Chinese
is a pufferfish, normally
of the genus Takifugu, Lagocephalus,
or Sphoeroides, or a porcupinefish
of the genus Diodon, or a dish prepared
from these fish.

— The End —