Brawn
turns bathos quick, like killing
a
fish, gutting, scaling, baking
the
poor bony thing, my girl howling
your
tasteless flesh ash in my mouth.
There’s
no logic. I eat meat but have
softened
to catch and release
til
you deep-throated the hook, lip
to
gullet, musta ripped right into
that
stinky mullet the old guy said
to
bait with, just like he showed me
where
to throw in that golden hole
in
the reef. A purple evening cast,
the
rod plunged to a longbow and god
you
were glory to catch, just murder
to
kill, the thrill quick slipped to scale
and
blood as you bashed your muscle on rock.
I
clamped you in a teatowel and jiggled
and
yanked that chemically sharpened
shank
tented too deep in flesh for parting,
barb
a pitched part of you, like your little
parcel
of bone reverberating later
down
my own sad gulping moat. No good
cutting
the line just to let you die
so
cruel to be kind I cut your throat.
No
Isis decap more bungled. Please fish
just
stop breathing, but your gills keep
going,
little blood bubbling bellows, wrists
slitting
over and over like the raw hooping
sobs
of my fishergirl, deserted me now
up
the shore, horror fled the scene
of
me cleaning you badly in the dark
with
a poor kitchen knife and Samsung light …
Wasn’t
dinner a hoot that night?
‘He
killed it’, across the immiserated
maw
of the table. Come on daughter, you
eat
the stuff, I just cut out the middle man …
Pain
cools like a pie on the windowsill
of
a Loony Tunes cartoon, and by tuck-in
time
she at least looks at me, with this new
depth
of wound that sees the monster in her
father,
or some transfigured creature, and
via
that last pathetic look on which
I
snap the light I see the jellied black
saucer
of your own dumb eye, stupid bream.
Terrific. Jeez. I been there too.
ReplyDelete