MARK A. MURPHY
Mark A. Murphy is the editor of online journal, POETiCA REViEW. His poetry has
appeared in over 250 magazines in print and online. He is the author of 6 full-length
collections including The Ontological Constant, out in summer of 2020 in a bi-lingual
German/English edition from Moloko Print in Germany.
Prelude in E-Minor or Milner Place Hoists Sail
We cannot go with you this time
All-consuming night
has swallowed the solemn moon
So hightide and wave retire
and the piano charms with regret
in the reed beds
and mealie fields
where the window birds mourn
under an overcast sky
*
Now we must say manana
left behind on the rocky shore
to follow our own callings
Melody and harmony breeding
tears as we return
to your meditations and poems
without you
lost in the song of the sea
where the starless chords stretch
and shrink time
*
Still boy becomes man and man dust
departing the cares
of this world with all its joy shapes
Intolerance of Uncertainty
Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.
—Sigmund Freud
So, Raskolnikov idly asks, what am I
that invites the sadism
of my fellows?
He is feeling guilty, which simplifies.
Tell him psychoanalysis
has not been invented yet, though we believe
his guilt precedes Freud,
sex with Sonia, and his evocation
of rowdy peasants flogging the emaciated horse
to death in the street. Tell him
scalded dogs weep at lesser cruelty. Tell him
grown men are crueller
by far—and more selfish—
faced with their own weaknesses
than little boys, which is why the devil need not cry.
Someday every tormentor must fall from grace.
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