Five Poems by Jim Murdoch

 

The Road Not Taken  

 

(after Frost)  

 

I took a road  

although in fairness 

the road took me.  

 

I meant to choose 

the choice road 

and could’ve sworn I had 

 

but sad fact is it was 

Destiny or determinism 

or some hoodoo that led me— 

 

by the hand, the heart or,  

more often than not,  

my dick— 

 

and all I had to do,  

and did,  

was be myself.

  

 

Man’s Rules / Nature’s Order 

 

Are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling? – M.C. Escher 

 

I hate rules 

(now, don’t get me wrong, 

I like rules 

when the rules make sense, 

not when 

they change willy nilly or 

when you 

only find out they existed 

after the fact) 

 

but I love order. 

Order doesn’t rely on rules to 

be orderly. 

It’s like beauty in that regard, 

beholden to 

no one and answerable only 

to its own 

aesthetic. Like snowflakes in 

a blizzard.

 

The Illusion of Stillness 

 
Such immediate qualities as red and blue, sweet and sour, tone, the pleasant and unpleasant, depend upon an extraordinary variety and complexity of conditioning events; hence they are evanescent. They are never exactly reduplicated, because the exact combination of events of which they are termini does not precisely recur. – John Dewey, Experience and Nature 

 
            The first thing you need to realise 

             when preparing to read a poem is 

           every individual word in a poem is 

          “a poem of poems” 

                                 (Whitman knew that) 

                 and since words are defined by 

              their operations that would make 

              a poem a what? 

                              a complexity of words?   

  Basically, a poem is a recipe as opposed  

  to a finished cake or a stew. 

 

  No two cakes or stews are the same 

  even if the same chef prepares them. 

      No two teaspoonfuls are the same, 

    no two pinches, no two dashes and 

 no two words are ever, ever the same, 

 not once the blending’s done. 

                                And there’s more: 

no two silences are ever alike 

                                  (Cage knew that) 

and no two emptinesses are ever alike 

      so, you can’t even trust the spaces 

         between words or the blankness 

         embracing them. 

                                       Everything in 

         a poem depends. It is not a thing, 

         it is a means. 

                                    Most things are. 

 

 

 

 

The Dream Cycle 

 

Cartoon Law 1 states that a body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. 

 

The puddle dreamt of being a cloud. 

Then one rapturous June afternoon 

her wish came true, frustratingly so. 

 

It was not long before it dawned on her 

that nebulosity is all fluff and nonsense 

and she wasn’t best suited to cloud life, 

so, she began dreaming of rain and hail, 

of thundersqualls, storms and blizzards. 

 

“Way better!” she squealed as she spun 

and she soared and she plummeted and 

we all know how that played out. 

 

Bigger puddle, mind, so that was something.

 

 

Hope Et Al 

 

The concept of hope is nothing more than giving up. A word that holds no true meaning. – Madara Uchiha 

 

Saying there’s always hope is 

like saying there’s always time. 

There is but it’s not always yours. 

 

Most hopes are dolled-up wishes, 

delusive beliefs egged-on 

by wants and ornery Optimism. 

 

Expectation thinks he’s entitled. 

He doesn’t need any -isms 

because God is on his side 

 

and as far as Willing goes, pah! 

That’s just wishing 

with a scrunched-up face.

Jim Murdoch is a Scottish writer living in Cumbernauld. He's been writing for over fifty years and his list of rejections is voluminous but he keeps at it. He's written most things over the years--novels, stories, songs, even plays--but he thinks of himself primarily as a poet and is currently producing poems at an unpresented pace. There are worse things to be in your sixties.