A fish out of water

 I’m like a fish out of water

Think about it for a moment

Do you see a fish on a bicycle?

Gliding through the medieval theme tune

Of an English university town?

Or do you perhaps see a dace?

Glistening in the small pale wet hands of a 13-year-old boy

Offering up the catch to the lens of his father’s smart-phone

A grin spreading like mildew over a photograph in the attic

J R Hartley remains stock still in his grave at this moment 

A fish out of water floundering on the unhooking mat on the bank

It is not necessary to use one but against regulations not to

As I wake into each day I am such a fish

Lured from the velvety depths of my freshwater natural habitat

Dreaming of my other son’s desire to buy a sports car

Or my own promotion to transgender Professor

I flounder motionless under the duvet and gasp for something.

Air? A reason? A light?

My gills flap as I struggle to readjust 

to my new circumstances in a world of actual pain.

Living is the oxygen of pain see.

My gills are losing the will to flap.

I cannot lie here long I’m simply not comfortable enough 

In my own skin. Someone make a decision?

Throw me back or take me home for supper.

The scales are tilting in the sun and birds are hanging on the air.

I am drowning in a sea of symphonies

Every morning I gasp theatrically

Sucked back through a portal onto the bank of the ribbon lake

Where my son sits learnedly with complete inscrutable patience

We have no idea what’s on the other end of the line

Nor do we really mind

It’s nothing that we have done but

the bailiff wants to see our permit for being here

I’d rather not be here think my hands offering up the phone screen

We will lose our shit later.

The cold sending us into paroxysms of pain-ick.

The line is tangled in that bush and we may as well go home now

Can’t even thread a watsitsname fishing line reel to reel?

How on earth do you learn these things?

I really thought it was magic of some kind or another 

In the end it was but one man’s magic

Is another man’s tawdry chore

It just depends how low you are when viewing the occasion

Oh yes I tried to please you I really did

Why are fishing tackle shops always so narrow?

Is it the same reason Barber’s poles seem to go on forever?

Even though their bloodied rags have long since scabbed over?

We've gone on repeating the same gory mistakes

And cracking the same corny jokes

But now we call them selfies or do I mean memes?

Either way I plumb the depths and drop the mic

Floats weights baits hooks clips lines and sinkers

It’s a guy thing it’s a dad thing it’s a thing thing

It’s an I never had a dad who could teach me that thing

How to bend a ball yes but not how to cast a line

How to play d yes but B minor no

Then like an ex-Inuit I did the maths

Taught myself how to fish? Does this sound any good?
It’s funny. Ha ha ha

No really the way I keep learning into my fifties

To Infifinities and beyond

Perhaps it’s a perch after all

The barbless tiny hook slipping painlessly from its gasping mouth

It’s strange how beautiful a fish mouth on a tiny fish can be

But not so much on the mouth of a tv detective

Specialising in strained grimaces to indicate depth

 

The tench on is killing me

but in the bright spring sunshine

Here and there on the blue green bank

That’s where I materialize every single fucking day

A fish out of water

You return the catch because to not do so would be cruel

Unless perhaps you are going to grill it for your supper

To dine on your netted friend. 

To savour the endeavours of your rewards.

But I must flap on the mat

On the bank remembering each day that I must breath air

And become comfortable in the burning atmosphere of being out of water.

Sleep the convict’s escape.

The syndrome sufferer’s reed bed of mysterious hope.

The warp and weave of gasp and whoosh.

A fish out of water on the unhooking mat on the bank

Gently picked up by the day and told

To become the father who took this photograph.