Whereupon the great tradition found itself, Floundering in muck, the flagellating sea foam And ragged, unmerciful depravity: a lungfish; The lurid miscreant with the abandon of A top-heavy star, or photon. It crawls, or maybe Distills a warrantless idea straight from the cosmos Borne, it’s rumored, of necessity for capital. The gasps for breaths are inimical and costly, But the slime-assuaging wind, forsworn And shapely, congeals around the bubbly, Piscine no-name. For so many true-believers, A dawn is clapping out of latency, something like Garages open to the day without people. There is, To the lobular fins, a tender hedonism and upright Sense of atavistic colors, like bloodless red and Red-less rage; benumbing synesthesia worth The fall from ease and scrumptious days without Quizzes, teaching lessons to the echoes. Curling Around the moment, the lungfish harps A ditty taking shots at deities abstaining once Again. The greenery beyond the banks are Preening for the nascent forms rebellion strikes At unexpected times and places, always free But doomed to catching on. And what strange Bedfellows the lungfish makes with structure, Laid out on sand like a blueprint for amassing; But still, the quiet touch of harsher tones Summoning themselves for the occasion is Imperceptibly housed somewhere the lungfish Is not privy to, where destiny is daylight. Gone Are the nights where nomenclature’s blue Pariah wipes the slate as clean as shuttles; The lungfish absorbs its newest memories into Absolute refinement, takes a stuttering stipulation Toward the avant-garde unknown to fate, until A club is brought, by differing opinion, to its head That cracks, opposable as hominoid deliverance.
Jake Sheff is a pediatrician and veteran of the US Air Force. He’s married with a daughter and six pets. Poems and short stories of Jake’s have been published widely. Some have even been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook is “Looting Versailles” (Alabaster Leaves Publishing). A full-length collection of formal poetry, “A Kiss to Betray the Universe,” is available from White Violet Press.