JIM MURDOCH

 

 

Misery

 

Nowadays too many of us seek comfort

in the arms of Misery

or between her breasts or thighs.

 

Why do we do that,

knowingly

look in the wrong place?

 

The best I can say about Misery is

she’s always been there for me.

I guess that counts for something.

 

The Shape Of Pain

 

Full disclosure:

I was in pain when I wrote this.

 

Though not agony.

There’s nothing poetic about

 

agony but like

athletes and sadists poets see

 

pain as more than a

barrier to break through or scale.

 

(although the image

tickles us because deep down we’re

 

all sad romantics):

pain is something we can shape, sculpt,

 

sign and exhibit.

As long as it’s the right kind of

 

pain.

 

For The Record

 

I came to this poem to be on my own

but there’s room here for two

(you shouldn’t be embarrassed);

it’s not hard being alone in company.

 

You can even stand next to me, if that

makes things easier for you

(there’s no need to feel guilty),

but don’t imagine we’re friends or anything;

 

this isn’t a conversation.

 

Diptych

 

I used to be a Poet with a capital P.

These days I pee twenty times a day and never quite

enough.

 

When I frame these images in my head—a diptych

of sorts—I can almost convince myself pish like this

is art.

 

In Summary

 

I have blathered on,

on and on when I could be bothered—

        to or with or at or mostly about

        if you want the truth

                 (the God’s honest truth

                or what I pass off as truth in His name)—

for sixty years

         (more or less, more often more than less)

about this and that by and large,

either this or that or the other

or nothing much at all and

at the end of the day—

        at the end of tens of thousands of days

                 (but not the foredoomed End of Days)—

I find myself quite blathered out.

 

 

  JIM MURDOCH

 

JIM MURDOCH has been writing poetry for fifty years and has graced the pages of many now-defunct literary magazines and websites and a few, like Ink, Sweat and Tears and Poetry Scotland that are still hanging on in there. For ten years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives quietly in Scotland with his wife and, whenever the mood takes him, next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels: Jim, not the cat.