Two Poems

 

by Rich Murphy

 

 

 

 

24 Hour News Cycle Spoke

 

 

Spinning for a living,

open wallets sneak around.

Dizzy constituent democracy suspends

before them who do and don not believe.

Where the wheel of the interpreters

and the audience meet:

Rubber road, tufted load, puff, poof, pfft.

At the sprocket

where the $5000 dish dinners

balance, clinking glasses

and the current events distract:

On the side of ignorance

the joke so few voters know

runs for election each term.

Pedals push back at talking heads

while the juggling exercises

at rights and lefts.

The viral blogospheres infect

with good senses of timing.

The handlebar mustache bell rings

but never crashes.

 

 

 

 

Found Atlas

 

 

Founding fathers arrived

with mallets and saw.

Their eye teeth spit would:

judge witnesses.

(Is by tribes was ignored.)  Oops.

Later Galt Gulch was sentenced

and innocence bleated

in the deep streets.  Many range animals

were not by then and close to now.

All the trips taken to Big Sure,

and the book was never thrown.

The bible sorts by way in highway robbery.

Going to work on banning Boston,

bands of minders struck and strike,

and the guilt is left for democrats.

Shruggers vault over penniless bodies.

The gated homes pinch out daily.

Little guys are proctored and gambled.

By payday trickle teachers smile.

Envy on Saturday rules until Monday

when it is buried for five days.

Lessons learned.  Once again

slaves to entertainment remain:

fist frustrated, loser lusting.

This time through futures

the cow hands, calling out

to the philanthropic filanderer,

deposit from flesh in a desert.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rich Murphy taught writing and literature at Bradford College and Emmanuel College in MA before coming to Virginia Commonwealth University.  His credits include two books of poems, Voyeur and The Apple in the Monkey Tree, chapbooks Great Grandfather, Family Secret, Rescue Lines and Hunting and Pecking and essays on poetics in Folly Magazine, The International Journal of the Humanities, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture, Fringe and Journal of Ecocriticism.