Managing Fish Stories
The white lies of late December are upon us.
Frozen fish dream of warm tape water.
Every step is a cliff-top until April
then we surrender again to the telltale myths,
the cheerful fraudulence.
Only the old survive all this;
beautiful people wash-up on sandy beaches
create more buttery lobster commercials,
evening gowns drip like sequined icebergs.
The young are headlong as usual
and will not stop
until they mend us into their dreams,
they sew our jester hats
with a pitying love just as we did.
It’s impossible to regret anything
when the very ground under our feet
is begging for more fables, more of anything
to keep us going in a direction identified as forward.
We who still dispense the sweet nothings
of glassy-eyes wizards,
must be seen as fully clothed,
able to function on the old fictions
steady, and not sinking into our frozen boots.
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2021
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