Cave Dwelling
Rich Murphy
Daily, any tears not used
to scrub the floors well in eyes
to instruct footing for tomorrow.
The buckets lent for consolation leak,
weeping: dew better, dew better.
The choreography between trauma
and a smile twists and shouts,
so that a vision unrocked and unshamed
by back drop never arrives in dreams.
Too many forks in the road determined
after the starting point and muddle
for imagining a hard right or left.
Now, good intentions carry for the dead end.
Here, invisible to citizens not banished
by Plato, long divergent paths craft
while machines mine with information
for the philosopher kink:
Exhausted will consumes.
Rich Murphy’s poetry collections have won two national book awards: Gival Press Poetry Prize 2008 for “Voyeur” and in 2013 the Press Americana Poetry Prize for “Americana.” These poems are from Asylum Seeker, the third in a trilogy focusing on globalizing Western / American culture due from Press Americana January 2018. The first collection in the trilogy is Americana and Body Politic, the second, is published by Prolific Press in January 2017. Murphy’s first book The Apple in the Monkey Tree was published in 2007 by Codhill Press. Chapbooks include Great Grandfather (Pudding House Press), Family Secret (Finishing Line Press), Hunting and Pecking (Ahadada Books), Phoems for Mobile Vices (BlazeVox) and Paideia (Aldrich Press).