Anti-Catch Poem by Luke J. Holt

What have you proudly caught today, girl of the sea? No big loss to throw a wolf off your boat.
Some well groomed stag
Eyes dull as stale water
Dumb like the fish
Something about the hollow head is sexy in its unknowing perhaps?
How easy it must be to exude bravado without an informed digit on the thumping vein of the truth that wracks and brambles a heart that knows its place and worth.
This bizarre offers curios of the same hard, unfriendly face in baskets of the same veneer swallowed time and again by painted fools raised by blood and time itself to fall for human stones whom they decorate like heroes with poet's laurels and warrior's wreaths.
What kind of instinct creates such animal blindness?
They will swear they are nothing until i am seen beside them
Then they measure themselves to the Anti-catch
The dweller of dead-pans
The expressive Beta lunatic of the posh and gaudy east
Untended and adept purveyor of worthless human love given free in painless but unaccepted packages that soak in rain and go unopened
Affirmative genie in ceaseless vigil, his lady Aladdin dead in the camel-less dunes
The bread that sits dry while choosy sisters butter the potatoes
The number not chosen or lucky because its shape is ugly
A fat eight or lanky seven
A six that could be nine if it flipped its lid
A three that cannot face a four
Can you blame the inpatient drowning?
Can you relate to the well that fills because the water elsewhere looks purer?
Would you again consider the first well if it were not?
A war bird in cardboard armor flies knowing not that its feathers are swathed in garbage
It shrieks like a topless siren, for inside there is no mockery to be had and no parody to be seen.
The anti-catch is worth rubbish when gold
Seen evil when petty and shamed when righteous
Second to all and victor of none
Penniless and judged beside they who tote riches
The most keen and noble of the king's seven sons who even street urchins and aging matrons refuse while six princes lay recumbent, fat with grapes and greedy hands touching slithering, excited flesh soft with expensive moisture.
You'll never catch me
You'll never even attempt to
The blue tiger you avoid while birdwatching
You fickle naturalist
Of all this wildlife i find myself a hare-lipped goat in a corral full of fennel-scented lambs.
What coltish stranger will kiss a pauper when his mouth tastes like coins from the blood left by chewing love's glass?
Who will sate the viral curse?
Who has the snow-white heart to cast the L-shaped hook and bring home a loser for dinner?
My tiny body
Imitating crab
Reaching for lines that cross and snag at its touch
Bringing other baneful sea-dogs together in fated pursuit
A big eyed mare hued like the first blue hood of night
Her head like the helm of an old motorcycle
Snorting at the mules in ill-will.
A world in which ugliness is relative unless it is my own is a world where the hearty meal is discarded when the garnish is crooked while stale crumbs are savored and mistaken for roasts
Only those who dine decide what feasts are filth and which fish-bones get their plates licked
Or vice-versa
As long as an anti-catch is not on the menu
It is always taken by the chef to the alley and tossed to the spindly dogs who don't eat it and past the transients who don't reach for it.

She leaves with her kettle of frail and diseased flounder
She learned by observation that fish don't feel
She has come to terms with this boundary
The ones who are worth asking if it hurts to be hooked are the ones she won't catch
The ones she doesn't fish for
That wait for dainty harpoons to snag their gills and test their fate
The ones that speak of pain are left in the sea with shredded gills to envy the dumb eyes of today's catch and watch others follow their stringy threads to judgement.
No barbs in my throat
Ask all the women at the docks and marinas
I'm never in season
I'm always cooked wrong
and I'm never served