It is raining fish on the Australian outback

NOTE: on further readings, I do not  like the line break version... try an edit of the short prose piece...

I first wrote this as a prose poem but found it too difficult to read and I did not feel it worked. So I rewrote as line verse as below, four line stanzas with a closing couplet. To me this reads better as a way into suggestions and ideas offed by ficto-criticism, written as a verse novel, rather then the prose poetry version.

It has to be read such that each line break is a new breath which interrupts the flow of breath suggested by a prose version. Each stanza break is a bigger interruption to a line break alone with the breaks or interruptions inside each line made by commas, semi colons, full stops and so forth.


IT IS RAINING FISH

Wild melons growing in summer over
black soil plains in north west New South Wales
are called paddy melons. I once told some
of my Sydney friends how it rains fish out

here in violent late summer, late afternoon
thunderstorms. They refused to believe me.
No bullshit, fair dinkum, it rains little fish
about a quarter to half an inch long

sucked up from waterholes which have not dried
out in the hot sun with strong updrafts to
be dropped again into puddles and holes
squiggling and drying out in the small to

medium sized puddles to become fish
emulsion fertilizer and survive
in larger lagoons to again be sucked up
to fall with the rain down onto the plains

Bobby Cod, they are called and that is how
fish spread across the plains. A cowboy has
left a note for me to meet him at the
beat across the road from where I live and

we leave felt tip needs on toilet walls that
is how we meet. There is nothing as
sensual, erotic as making love to
a cowboy in the swishing black mud when

the late afternoon summer storms belt heavy
fish rain onto our wet naked bodies.