New Poem: The Prize

I've been working on this poem for several days now and it's finally at a point where I think it's readable.  The style is a little different than my normal stuff, and was inspired by a literary group/movement known as, the language poets.  In my reading of some of these poets, I quickly noticed that many of the poems seemed to attempt to combine visual art with poetry through the use of line breaks, punctuation, font size, etc.  Now I'm not ready to start throwing parenthesis all over the place, type everything in lowercase, or abandon punctuation altogether; that's just not who I am.  I do, however, like to experiment and I hope to continue to challenge myself creatively.

The actual subject of the poem was inspired by a beta fish I won when I was younger.  It lived the best 3 days of its life in an over-sized tank in my bedroom.


The Prize

Here at the fairgrounds,
A fishtail brushing across
The inside of a plastic bag
Makes me think
This game is rigged and it is
Impossible to win.

Sometimes I worry I am not living;
The life I want seems so much
On the edge of things that I can
Barely feel it,
The prize
Just out of reach.

With my hand,
I cast a ping pong ball into the pit
Of bowls and watch as it goes
Careening this way and that over their heavens
And lands in still water.

As I hold a bag up to my eyes, shut
Tightly with a twist-tie,
Soft gills flap back and forth, wet wings
Forcing a draught beneath the thin
Armor of scales,
As bellows feeding a chambered fire,
Surrounded by a world of water
And a corpus of cold
Blood.

Sometimes I worry I am not living;
The life I have seems bound and motionless
Under a stale sea that I fear
Will never satisfy.

And with my prize in hand I think,
Is this faint thing I feel
Under my skin
Really what I want or just
Another object of desire
Dancing on the rim of it?