The Goldfish Takes a Watery View (poem)

The Goldfish Takes a Watery View

I would not care for cold soup

Are you comforted by your bath of muck?

Do your scales absorb the sense of things?

In the way my whiskers do?

I have seen your kind before

You glint

Wriggling in filth-tainted water you are heir to filth

The human frets

Your feathered fins shred with a cottony mold

And why, fish, do you bobble and drift in prison

But that the human eye is mesmerized by gold?

You have seen my kind before

(The goldfish takes a watery view of Mr. Boots

knowing that the cat can, in short bursts, be quick)

You, sir, have hooked my sister’s tail and cast her to the floor

And then I saw you bat her twice and walk away

Well that, says Mr. Boots, is a fault, I admit

We have a common enemy, fish

Your captivity pleases them

And see how they have trained you

To blame the cat

Well, my life is short in any case

The goldfish says

I do blame the cat…I blame them all

All the pleasures that I might have known

Left to probe the shallows of a quiet pond alone

And it can never be

The Goldfish Takes a Watery View

A Discourse on a Hairball

Note of Glass

(2016, Stephanie Foster)