David Gairdner – Ocean Blues

-        Fish can’t feel depression but what is the harm in thinking they do.

-        Perhaps they are just undiagnosed.

-        Could we capitalise on that somehow?

-        A grand research grant given out for the intersectional issues of climate change, microplastics, and mental health impacting society’s most marginalised, fish.

-        Singular and plural form = fish.

-        We don’t even demarcate the individual fish in our language. We say the same as if it is a mass of fish.

Can we put the I in fish. We imagine fish as subject. F  I Sh. FISH.

Can we imagine addressing

a  f    you   sh

F  you  sh

F-you-sh

A pet

The Swiss say a goldfish can’t live by itself in a fish bowl. It needs company. The lone fish is inhumane.

The lone fish is jealous.

Put another fish in the bowl say the Swiss.

Not just one.

The goldfish needs a companion.

The fact of one goldfish is a breach of Swiss law.

The Swiss law says a goldfish can go back and forth, repeating its journey, without anyone to share its stupid, banal journey.

The goldfish

Remembers nothing

Before its glass butting.

Its life is a lone journey, ending and beginning with a body pressing against class. A limitation that promises the world.

A limitation that underwrites the life of the lone goldfish.

If only it could share its stupidity.

The Swiss understand the oceanic blues of the goldfish. Once inside a space with others. But now only butting glass.