Poems about Fishing

I wrote a poem. Well, some poems.

The old line “there’s plenty more fish in the sea” apparently bugs me a lot. I first wrote a short poem about it back in November 2012, thought it was pretty okay, and then earmarked it for a long-delayed fanzine, so it hasn’t really been seen much. (I then checked this website and realised it’s been here all this time, but I still consider it unshared up till now.)

Then I unwittingly harped on the theme in a poem I wrote this February, which I put up on World Poetry Day (March 21st). I think there’s something here, but I wouldn’t call it done. I put it up because…

…I figured I should either make it a trilogy/three-part poem/triumvirate on a theme/whatever, or a massive In Memoriam-style treatise on how much this one phrase bugs me, or stick my fingers in my ears and pretend I’m not a moron who keeps writing the same poems. I went for the first option this week, and so here they all are:

Fishing

They tell me
‘There are plenty more fish in the sea’
As I sit here on the dock
Line drawn, hook baited
Waiting
Still waiting for a bite.

♦

There are other fish in the sea
but she’s a mermaid, a myth
that sings to me. Her love song
draws me near, across the ocean,
but my ship is repelled by
rocks and waves and winds
and I am beaten from her cove
into a still, silent sea.

Fellow sailors call it an escape,
a reprieve from the ocean’s floor,
and yet I long to sail again,
to destroy myself in her waters.
To me, it is still, silent sea
that holds my true death.

♦

There are plenty of fish, they say,
as if women are just fish, caught and
consumed, dumb and identikit,
like my need’s indiscriminate.

And yet I am no fisherman.
I am Ahab, I sail the seas
searching only for one. My catch
is precise, and she is no fish.