Jogging the Mind

Hello all,

Below you will find a prose poem that I wrote almost a year ago. This one is more approachable but it helps if you’ve read Raymond Carver and Richard Brautigan. I think they’re great and that this piece is fun. Let me know what you think, if you decide to read it.

All the best,

JCO

Fishing to End the Sunny Days

I hate fishing. Brautigan could have thought of another metaphor. Not all of us fish, you know. I’m no trout, never caught one. Though, a friend’s dad brought us out once. I caught a Sunny and in a flash its gills turned the white of my hands a muddy red. He said hold tight but that made it all the sharper, the breathing blades of that flash of life. Ray Carver’s problems postpone for fishing and I’m left reeling, more and more. Nowadays, fish won’t take the bait but I’ll bite the naked air, empty and unsatisfied as screams echo around the woods. The creek and I babble on, completely alone. I won’t fish, it will not reel me in because I’m hanging out to dry. The ripples and streams splash and steam an uneasy mist around my boots as I edge closer, until my echoes fade into the brush, near silent again. If only the creek would quiet, then perhaps I would know a singular peace. Yet as I cast the end of my line into the void, it echoes back again, my silence breaking with the light of day as the bubbling creek’s currents cease, drowned out.