Joe Oppenheimer

How bizarre an expression, “Fish out of water.”  Fish, even if capable of choice, would never choose to leave their habitat.  Not being fish, we can, and do, choose to leave our homes and subject ourselves to new environments.  We do so often with great hope, even knowing the voyage may end badly.  So there are the John Browns, the William Lloyd Garrisons, the Wilders, the Lorcas, Stravinskys, and the Kings - all with dreams.  We pay homage to their courage to choose to leave safe zones, to follow their dreams often enriching others.  Some of those explorers were even scribblers.  They felt they had to escape their environments and find or create a new place.

      Most of these escape artists are more mundane, not heroic creators but rather only unfortunate ensnared captives.  They too are fish out of water, individuals needing the freedom or chance to search for or find a supportive environment for themselves.  Would that it were so simple.  Many other ‘fish’ have freely made choices that were thought to be inconsequential but are later found to have been ill-fitted, leaving them in an environment that steals their memories, or sustenance.

            Lucky pedestrian me.  I have not been a fish out of water.  Rather, I am only a person willing to follow a possible muse.  However, these poems you find here, do, each in their own way, deal with how some people are ill suited for their environment.  This may be because of the choices of persons that lead to a point where they must escape themselves, others, or their place (as in War on Terror and Sharing).  Or it may be because the social arrangements are such that the individual is left ‘out of water’ (as in Super Heroes and Sudoku).  Finally, it can be the passage of time that makes the choices one on