Still Life

What so intrigues the fish-watchers?
The effortless fluidity?
The endlessly self-scouring memory?
What bliss, to feel always renewed,
Floating--unpursued--in two feet cubed,
To dart about for never-changing flakes
Of paper food,
Companions fixed and constant
(Seeming so: The mostly orange uniform obscures
Who comes and goes).

Thus viewed from inside,
Does our cube of atmosphere
More or less trump theirs?

With jagged, fretting struts
Of our daily anxiety
O'erdrawn so blatantly
Before their bulbous stares unblinking,
Our manic, clamorous troubles
Slightly muted by the droning pumps and bubbles,
Who lives a life more sheltered from fear?
Who should envy whom in here?

And with its end, there are no dreams to come,
No mortal coil to shuffle,
Just a gentle roll and sinking toward the surface;
Only We soliloquize on action, future strife, and purpose.
Yet, to continue this forgetting, birth 'til death,
Is that still life?

I must confess my secret pleasure:
To watch in fourth dimensions,
To sit beyond, at right angles to both ogler and angler
And watch the symbiotic tension
Of mutual voyeurism
As a separate, living organism.