Gospel & Universe ♒️ A River Journey

Fry Day: The Atheist Fish

skipping skool - the unholy haul - the drowning fish - fins & wings - bad friday

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skipping skool

[A minister of state] said, You are not a fish; how do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes? Zhuangzi rejoined, Your are not I. How do you know that I do not know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?

and they wonder why i drink, the idiots, in their shrinking world that always made sense to them, but not to me

even as a small fry, i'd slip out of the stream and watch them swim along, always in the same direction

not even thinking about the sonar of the pink gods with their feet in their mechanized floating machines

with their engines and their wheels, their knives and crosses

i'd think to myself, we're sitting ducks, fish in a barrel, just waiting for the pink gods to pick us off one by one, or in one apocalyptic haul to sweep us all away

from the turtle in the deep to the glow-worms on the crest

the only gods i ever respected were the pirates with their honest code of personal interest and dishonesty

who didn’t give sermons or have coats of arms or ladies with golden haloes

just black sails

get what you can, reap havoc and sow terror

like the razor-toothed barracuda

that’s their public image, anyway, but i remember them with more affection

i remember their amber rum, barrels of the stuff — dark, light, sweet, sweeter

i was happy to drink with them, the ones that drowned and joined us in the coral reefs

we drank their golden rum, their añejo, their señor ron ambar

we drank until there was no difference between fish and drowned sailors

until there were no rules about how fish were supposed to behave

or about how much we could turn this way and that

about how much we could drink and with whom

about how we were supposed to sit, even though we couldn't sit

no backbone, sluggards! yelled out the headmaster in the water-boarding school

where all my cousins sat, primly taking the bait

i saw all this from the pirate cove mark twain beneath

until one day i saw the end of their days

the unholy haul

it was mid-morning and the sun tilted down through the layers of waves

till it cast a multiple light on the coral shelf

i was still drinking after a heavy night with the betta fish, with their fancy fins and angry jaws

i was entirely spent but still drinking rum, long past ignoring the school bell (hooky, they called it)

i was looking at the refracting light: green, emerald, topaz, as it angled onto the rim of the shelf

as i sat there exhausted against the coral wall, looking out at the light and the current when i felt it: the belt of angles shifted in one large movement that you could only see if you were apart from it, inside plato's underwater cove, hungover, with your back against the wall

the water shook but they didn't notice anything

they were in school with their backs straight, reciting something about love — heterosexual love between fishes and family values — when they all got swept up in a big net

the memory of it snaps something inside me, tears me apart, makes me want to follow them upward toward heaven

the bright blue sky into which the bubbles break, a martini surface of vodka, melon liqueur and blue curaçao

beneath me swells a dark current of rum, and ahead of me lie the coral-white altars of cocaine

and i let the heavens be

i've given up twisting and shouting

i just let myself go

it's what they call drowning your sorrows

but what could that possibly mean when you're a fish?

 the drowning fish

but still you could say that i’m drowning, falling into the forbidden deep, the dirt highway of the crab, the way of the octopi and the pulsing jellyfish

here in the deep i let go of the dreams that were supposed to lift me up, the things i was supposed to see

the impossible things, the Way of the Sky, the communal capitalized Dream of how we'd all swim together for the rest of our after lives

ghost-fishes swimming in the same school

fish-bone skeletons circling the sky

fins & wings

all i remember now is the everlasting disappointment on the faces of my mother and father

with their talk of the Fishermen and the Loaves, the Virgin and the Dove

the Way of the Fishes and Sky

the fins that were supposed to turn into angel wings never made any sense to me

because all i ever had were fins

and because of the fisherman with their pointy hats and dusty sandals

who only cared about the souls of the humans they rescued

they said nothing about the fish themselves

unlike good old laozi, who wrote that fishes should not be taken from the deep

or zhuangzi, who told his companion, how do you know that i do not know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?

at least those two gave us the time of day

to them we weren't just monsters or dinner in their eyes

not that the chinese are in general any kinder to fish

bad friday

even when i was a tadpole swimming in the sunday school, all they talked about were the things that were happening up there

somewhere up there in the air, above the air that we could see only surrealistically from the depths of the sea

they were always talking about the most famous Fisherman of them all, the one who could walk on top of the water but never swam in it

yet if He did come down, it was to help some guy called jonah to escape the monsters of the sea

meaning us

or he only cared about the little children who would come to him and sit quietly 

and listen to his sermon on a dry mountain in a school on sun day

so down here in the depths of the water, i drink by the light of the moon

and think to myself, to the fisherman, fish were really people, or, worse, a sacred meal

sunday mass, good friday, fish on friday

fly fishing, deep sea fishing. fry day

it was all up in the clouds, there was no reality to it

fish that fly

but how could they fly when their fins were broken?

how could they fly when they were clubbed, their bodies hauled up from the deep in a net?

or when they had an iron hook through their lips, when all they were doing was swimming around, looking at the white incandescent coral reefs, bleached by the noxious chemicals that slipped from the mechanical gills and rudder tails of the hungry gods?

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my comrades have all been swept up from the deep and broken on a wooden table

a wooden altar six feet long, brass handled

and they call it a sacred meal

fish and chips, battered

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one more shot, bartender 

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