Time

 Dear Will:

Jonah and the Whale by Pieter Lastman

I had a couple of weeks of just plain happiness after San Francisco.  I was looking forward to ending my history of depression with ketamine therapy.  I was feeling able to call people.  And then I got triggered.  I had a conversation at coffee hour with a new church member who has Alz.  Then my movie on Sunday night, Metropolis, flopped.  Then a friend told me I'd hurt her feelings last June.  There's also the fact of completion.  You know how I always got when I finished a project -- post show downs.

We were asked to write about a myth in my poetry class and this is what I came up with:

 

THE COMPLAINT

 

 

Have you ever been inside a damn fish?  You think you got so much to say about it.  Sayin’ it ain’t necessarily so and all.  Well, let me tell you it stinks.  It smells like your cat vomited out its dinner, ate it again, then shit it out, ate that then threw it up again.  It feels like you’re bein’ squished by some huge, wet, slippery snake.  It’s dark as a dungeon, deep as a well, you know what I’m sayin’?  But I wasn’t inside for no three days.  No, your boy didn’t need that much time to tap out. But I sure didn’t wanta go to that city, I tell you what.  It was a hella tough assignment. Was why I was on the damn boat in the first place.  He tells me, “Go straighten ‘em out in Nineveh.”  I said, “Hell no, I’m goin’  the other direction, if you don’t mind.”  Then He blows up this storm so I gotta jump the boat and wham!  I’m bait.  I’m thinkin’, “Really?  Really?  This is my reward for years of service, a fucking fish?  So I hollered, “I give, I give” and that thing barfed me back on the beach. So I did it, preached destruction and hellfire if they didn’t shape up.  Just hopin,  y’know, they’d keep sinnin’. No such luck.  No Sodom, no salty lady, no punishment, no rain of fire. Just a hundred thousand people sorry as shit for their sins.  I couldn’t stand it. So I’m sittin’ here under this tree suckin’ my teeth and starin’ at a  beautiful big city that should be smoke and ash.  Ain’t no profit in bein’ a prophet these days.