Rich Murphy: Inkwell Dilemma 9-10
From Pools of Thou
Towers of Babel bubble and lisp
on the surface of the collective unconscious.
Primeval swamps possess urges
and gaseous ideas worth wagging tonsils about.
The first stories inspire folk
to scratch their heads, clean their ears,
and build endless variations on a theme.
Mudslinging around the jobs becomes in bad taste.
A Moses takes two tablets and is called
a doctor of theology in the morning.
Later comes exegesis, born by mezzanines
and crying in the winds.
And by the time the thirteenth floors are added
science ties tongues into knots.
Astronomy’s gibberish = **+~x8#?
while biochemistry !:!:! with the finest whine
and most specific grunt.
Struggling to memorize evolution’s book and verse
and astrology’s articulate map,
the laborers of the construction site give up
easily for the down of muck
and mire’s simple nursery rhyme
while gods from amebas goose each higher.
When the first I-beam falls, it isn’t long
before girders, computer chips,
and invisible fields of energy tumble.
The moan of myth and murk tugs
at the confidence of worker As, Bs, Cs
to replace the birth of tomorrow
with the desire for fantasy of sleep.
With pay checks and a stick the residents
of thin air prepare for the backlash
of species hibernation: shape lips and blow.
Wee
My concern was always for the nobody, the man who is lost in the shuffle, the man who is common, so ordinary, that his presence is not even noticed. – Henry Miller
Primal flux feeds eyes to flashing neon lights,
landmarks, and foot prints from a pool.
The gumballs of young folk lend themselves
to big bubbles when the flavor is gone.
Parental golf and meat balls concentrating
on a night on the town bulge in the cheeks
of regret. Nets set to ensnare anything current
moving hoist humans behind fishing trawlers.
The rug pulled out from under feet defines
itself when each ass flattens on the earth,
a shot above the head. Somewhere between
a second’s two slashes, solar systems pass
with the slapstick routines designed to mimic
the thrills. Under the nose of the serious ambush,
the metamorphosis drags the chimera across
waves and particles, always more than groped for.
Mused
[H]is Muse has whored with many before him. - Harold Bloom
Along history’s dark street the boys
who beneath a lamp mistake lipstick
for a smile engage in scribbling.
The 21st Century readers continue
to balance themselves on the edge
of their seats for the girls to explain
how it is they have come to write.
Perhaps it involves a pimp and his harem.
A repressed number of Yeatses throw
themselves across their beds – and raise
their pens red with passion. Which ones
will speak for the neighborhood, their ages,
a culture? Each calligrapher wakes to
the goodbye note on the bathroom mirror
and his pants rifled through. Even big
shot Shakespeare! Somewhere in the ink
each quill wiggler knows it and worries
when. This penguin attempts to embrace
his echo of the past but she is rolled
over and still smoking. May sisters
and daughters have better luck with love.
Credits include the 2008 Gival Press Poetry Award for my book-length manuscript “Voyeur;” a first book The Apple in the Monkey Tree; chapbooks Great Grandfather, Family Secret, Hunting and Pecking, and Phoems for Mobile Vices, Rescue Lines; poems in Rolling Stone, Poetry, Grand Street, Trespass, The View from Here, New Letters, Pank, Segue, Big Bridge, EOAGH, Fact-Simile, foam:e, and Confrontation; and essays in The International Journal of the Humanities, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture, Fringe, and Journal of Ecocriticism.
