Five Poems by Jim Murdoch

 

It’s Complicated

 

No one ever loved anyone the way that person

wanted to be loved. – Mignon McLaughlin

 

I say I love you and I can see you’re pleased.

It’s generally accepted love is a good thing

and being loved is the best kind of love.

 

What you do not know—what you cannot know—is

how hard it is for me to love,

how hard it is for me to be sure what I feel for you

       (and be assured I do have feelings for you),

is indeed this thing people call love.

 

Saying I love you is easier than explaining all of this—

besides, I’m sure any explanation I might attempt

would not explain anything, since love is an emotion

and meaning an intellectual construct,

and neither really gets the other or gets on.

 

At the end of the day, just assume I love you

the way you think you love me and, yes, yes,

every question deserves an answer

 

but not everything warrants a question.

 

 

Happiness is a Pair of Glasses

 

Happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue.

– Dr. Viktor Frankl

 

The thing about metaphors

is we want to believe them.

It’s the “is.” Has to be the “is.”

 

We believe life is a journey

and happiness is always

three steps ahead of us when,

 

really, it’s just another word.

It doesn’t need to get

run down or caught up with.

 

It simply asks to be defined:

THIS is what makes me happy.

Not so hard really.

 

A cliché, then, to depict a metaphor:

A man looking for his glasses when

his glasses are perched on his head.

 

 

Purity

 

Theoretically total silence cannot exist. One can still hear the random movement of microscopic particles suspended in liquids or gases colliding with fast-moving atoms or molecules.

 

I’ve never been happy in my life.

Not completely.

I mean, I get the idea, I do.

 

I’ve also never seen red.

Not just red, red-red,

pure red.

 

I guess I might’ve seen red in passing.

In amongst the crimsons, the maroons,

the roses, rubies, rusts, burgundies,

vermilions and fire engine reds.

 

And it’s pretty much the same with anger

and joy and all the other core emotions.

 

I’ve been kinda happy, a kind of happy,

but there’s always a tinge of euphoria

or excitement or interest or pride or

any of forty others muddying the pool.

 

I guess it’s like silence that way.

It only truly exists in a dictionary.

 

 

Shrinkflation

 

To be honest

what passes for honesty these days,

what we pass off as honesty,

bears only a passing resemblance

to the great honesties of the past.

 

It happened gradually,

insidiously, to be honest,

a few grains of truth here

a few grains of truth there.

You know how it goes:

 

a junior marketer learns the

now-obsolete collective noun

for a group of truths is a dribble,

tells his boss, whose eyes go kerching!

and, well, it was all downhill from there.

 

 

Small Losses

 

[A]ll memories are to some degree false. – Martin A.Conway, Catherine Loveday, Consciousness and Cognition, Vol 33, May 2015, p.580

 

Once I realised memory was comprised

of 90% imagination and 10% experience

forgetting what I'd clearly never actually

remembered in the first place became

so much less of a burden, almost a relief.

 

You cannot lose

what was never truly yours

in the first place.

Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for fifty years and has graced the pages of many now-defunct magazines 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 (increasingly) next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels.