The Evolution of the Fish in a Tank

A silk swim swish slides through water

Settling to a sit still for a momentary sigh

Till tail then thrusts inching forward

Flaunting beauty through water

With an unacknowledged triumphant cry.

As the fish meanders, does it find

Aquatic objects

Dancing in pirouettes as they wind

Dizzy in their swirls of activity

That exists and so aptly reflects

The complexity of simplicity’s relativity

Do the colored stone

Produces patterns to be known

And reflected upon with revelation

And induce further observation?

Knocking a plastic weed

Already observed from many perspectives

Is its poor memory in a state of recede?

Reveling in stimuli devoured?

Contrast this stillness with the crazy outside

Projected in all of its valor

Amidst the peripheral proceeds.

Are observations selective?

Does the fish snatch serenity out of the incoming hail?

Shadows objects and colors, in grand stampede.

Or is the fish’s peace subjective

Defying the scientific objective

Filtering into its mind

The meaning of life unveiled,

Enhancing its perspective on power?

I pray the fish find’s its navigational extravaganza interesting

Twisting, turning, answering to its own requesting

Tolerating tank’s bubbles that are infesting

The water—bubbles sacrificed for the air’s ingesting

The result of human technological investing

In accordance with habitat evolutionary testing

As time goes on never resting

Dispersing thumping bubbles manifesting

A gurgling tickle in the fishes heart, jesting

In much the same way rhyme can be molesting.

The prime

Experience

Of time

Is intense

By design.

As intelligence

Sells time’s

Great essence

(which is Divine)

Humans dispense

Sad whines

Used to finance

The time’s

Disappearance

Into caged confines

Twenty-four hours a day the fish faces time’s insistence.

If it gets tired it will face the next seconds’ crime

Without the ability to murmur defiance

In mime

Spoken silence

Fish chimes:

“I know I’m

No influence

Enzyme,

Can’t sense

Time’s occurrence

I’m resigned

In truancy

To find

Future persistence

With time’s

Insistence,

Benign.

My credence

Is my spine’s

Indifference.”

And so does time ticks on

Not getting the fish anywhere

With the absence of change’s dare?

Occurrences have lulled around in quietness;

But then stop. Nose nubs against glass. The edge.

There sits a judging human bearing witness

To the fishes nothingness and dredge,

The production-less-ness of its existence,

The meaninglessness of mere subsistence

The fish stares back at this human desire

A flame of possessive fire

And so the fish is overwhelmed as it nears

The bottomless pit of the human eye

That bears the selfishness of death to fear

Greedy, heartbroken and dire– that eye

Of dreams dispersed like water into the wind

Bearing the rage of needs within

Salty, spiteful, smacking with grinning sneer.

At this moment, the fish seizes its immortal right

It thinks about craziness at drunken parties,

About promiscuous sprees and marriage decrees

And the baby that it observed appeared one night.

The fish perceives the human’s eternal plight

With tears that if uttered could fill the seas

The inevitability of loneliness summoning their pleas

That are extended to soften life’s bitter bite.

Human freedom—both material and intellectual

Might be beyond the realm of the fish’s captivity;

But human imprisonment is architectural,

Constructed of obligatory conformity and emotions

That are multi-wired tangles of electrical activity

All based on the premise of monetary devotion.

The potency of a prison will never be deluded,

A psychiatry reserved for the destituted.

Now, in the moment when the fish in the tank

Knows that humans and fish do not differ

It ponders the cage descending from God-given life, a miffer,

Until  human takes a net an scoops up the fish’s good soul

And fucking swallows the fish whole

Deeper into the reality we will call human skank!