Big Bill Boddington the webpage began in 2006 as a nondescript personal portfolio, which for the next ten years stood more or less empty. In late 2016, the dormant page found purpose at last: makeshift vessel for a series of deeply personal sonnets I'd started to write. The following poems document my journey—still ongoing—towards rehabilitation.
Across my pool another victim swims
I thrash against the confine of my cage
Those innocently flopping, gangly limbs
Provoke in me a pure and primal rage
What life is this for an aquatic beast?
Enslaved inside a children's swimming pool
Unable to suppress my urge to feast
But when I bite their fingers off I'm "cruel"
Alas, what can I do but swallow hate
and bide my time with dreams of brighter days?
In chlorinated water I must wait
Concealing the fury in my gaze
Imprisoned in this unbefitting pen
I long to feel saltwater once again
Intoxicated by the scent of blood
A fever dream of fury takes its hold
I close my eyes, observe the crimson flood
Those severed limbs adrift, lifeless and cold
The chaos of their screaming and their moans
The splashing of each hopeless, grasping arm
With phantom bites I break their brittle bones,
and, quickly, frenzied flailing turns to calm
Their ruptured remnants slowly start to sink
and settle on those pristine azure tiles
As ripples on the surface gently shrink
I see my prey laid out in little piles
To quell my hunger I daydream of slaughter,
but always wake encaged in sterile water
I stir awake encumbered by emotion:
homesickness for the thrill of open sea
Emancipating vastness of the ocean
A chance to start anew and simply be.
If only for a precious, stolen moment,
I'm swimming through the fabric of a dream,
Half-conscious of each deftly stitched component
Half hopeful of the promise in each seam
But dawn gives way to day: all dreams must die
The tang of salt regains its acrid sting
Translucent ceiling panels dim the sky
The muted sun relumes the world within
If I must waken with each passing day
I only ask these dreams don't fade away
July 11th 1999
began like any ordinary week
But when my keeper came for feeding time
I bit the bitch's unsuspecting cheek
She leapt back quickly clutching at her face
Blood dripping from her trembling fingertips
With abject horror screaming in her eyes
She traced the lacerations in her lips
November 9th of 2008
My former warden made his nightly check
but came a little too close to the grate
I saw my chance and bit the bastard's neck
I catalogue my wrongs not for attention
but so that I might one day find redemption
At night I lie still in the placid dark
and watch the world go by in monochrome
I wonder what it means to be a shark
Exiled a thousand miles away from home
Beyond the windows' warped, reflective glare
A silent swell of nightingales' song
pristinely punctures summer's sultry air,
reverberates a moment, then is gone
How black is night without the lonesome moon?
How limitless without the rising sun?
Will everything be over very soon,
or have I, in this moment, just begun?
How strange it is to be something so small,
How strange just to be anything at all
Submerged in smog of sea I stalk my prey
The unseen threat of death that lurks beneath
Amidst a violent spew of ocean spray
Their frantic eyes see nothing but my teeth
I sink them deep into their writhing flesh
Metallic punch of blood bursts from the wound
With every bite they struggle less and less
Until each tender limb has been consumed
A scarlet cloud swirls in the dark abyss
The only remnant of a perfect kill
I bathe in silent orgiastic bliss,
As vital fluid flows over each gill
My hunger deepens with every meal
The more I murder the better I feel
Some days when fish swam by I'd just look on
Content to recognise our common plight
They'd dart this way and that and then be gone
I'd watch their shadows zigzag out of sight
Last week a child swam up to my cage
and peered at me with big, begoggled eyes
Shared destiny reflected in his gaze
We're born and then we live and then we die
Perhaps we're more alike than we admit
and what unites us trumps that which divides
Between two boundless voids we all exist
Condemned to swim in vain against the tide
In weaker moments we can all forget:
We're struggling siblings in a single net
The evening that they hauled me out the sea
and dumped me in that claustrophobic tank
Began like every other one that week
With carefree swimming, mind serenely blank
No subtlety of setting seeming strange
No petty imperfections to portend
that instant in which everything would change,
and all that I had known before would end
I didn't struggle when the net came down
I think about this moment every day
As choking mesh encroached from all around
I solemnly consigned myself to fate
I haunt myself with visions of that scene
If only one could know what might have been
Imperfect circles traced with tired fins
An endless ritual to fill the time
that stretches out before me, for my sins
A punishment for no specific crime
Within this destinationless commute
I share a sombre certainty with man:
However many times I swim this route
it always takes me back where I began
I couldn't stop it even if I tried
The everlasting loop is all I know
From infancy to ashen eventide
Around and round and round again I go
We're all entranced in cycles of our own
I swim laps of the children's pool alone
Into the water several corpses plunk
Their agony preserved in half-thawed eyes
One instinct tells me I was born to hunt
A stronger one says simply to survive
The keeper walks away, his work complete
Says calmly to his peers "the shark's been fed"
I swim forth disappointedly to eat,
and wish that it was him in here instead
The taste is incomplete without the thrill
The purity of primitive pursuit
To feast without the pleasure of the kill
To bite at only one half of the fruit
The trauma of displacement leaves its scar
Lest we not remember what we are