It is not the truculent clock
who undoes you,
but the tiny yellow trickle
of fishes in the air,
each one smaller than a fingernail,
popping its frightened mouth,
clipping strings of you from the rest.
Some of the fishes will lodge
themselves in your purpling folds,
some die in your throat
and are reborn in your ever-
bulkening ass.
You never know if one
will stick in your heart,
and whether the poor guy
will gum things up for good,
or hold your vein open
with his idiotic jaw, like some sort
of cartoon fish-doorman.
They’re all so tiny as to remain
independently nameless, the fish,
and you don’t know what
to call the group of them, either.
In a touching display of futile attention,
you will drink their bubbling oil
hoping to confuse them, to insulate
yourself from their reckless feeding.
You figure another forty years of this, maybe
before you’re more fish than man.
They’re so, so tiny,
but everything adds up after
so many clocks. You wonder sometimes
how it will feel being mostly a fish.
“Will I smell?” you ask
the skeletal carp in the sky,
but you know the answer
is “blud.”
“Will I swim better?” you ask.
“Will my parents still love me?”
but you know the answer is
“No, not forever.”
It is not any second hand’s circular tripping
that kills your mother and you.
And the room doesn’t care.
And the clouds.
And your father can’t
do anything about it, but maybe
he’ll buy a red car.
You will hate the red car
and its retractable top,
the eight cups of steel
kicking around in the front,
pushing you
through the stream of them,
like some awful blob of water.