Rich Murphy - Two Poems

Snap Shot for Zoe

  

At the factory for consent,

the friendly-fire in false flags

rolls in war-fog banks to confuse

human shields without credit.

The production-line workers

from state to stage sing and pounce

to keep voters off the streets

to keep feudal walls futile.

Unfurled on both sides,

collateral damage waves

at the conveyor belt that swaggers

this way and that for engineers.

Filled with emotion dressed in reason,

pitch men greet alongside store shelved

promises that whistle and explode

with fantasy for bargain hunters.

Stick-pinned cities on a map

numb for empire reaching,

until Operation What Next stuns

within dominion and truncates.

Yours = Mine

  

When marketeers data-mine,

the innumerable veins, arteries,

and corpuscles respond only to kleśas,

so the pitchmen drill to confuse, alarm.

Cages jolt and helmet lamps blink

to morph senses into cents.

Without a scent, the inexperienced

money bag sits in shopping carts,

where eye-level jingles cry.

The intersection that negotiates

the esophagus and bowels flutter

with a thousand canaries

that drop into the sump.

The central nervous system

recovers only when the target

has been emptied: A lambskin

purse turned inside out.

A buck in the cross hairs:

A religious experience.

Gallows timbers witness.

To close a mind to plugs, hype,

and deposit raiders provokes

according to the mountain movers,

Bill Board and Buzz Ward.

How many lotus positions

hang in effigy at the breakfast table?

Decapitators move in next door

to brand a back side or go viral.

Dopamine fixes rage through frontal lobes,

while episodic memory occupies in the cortex,

conducting for a sympathy across synapses.

Stripped to acid runoff and tailing mud,

the barren shopper arrives at the landfill.




Rich Murphy’s credits include books Body Politic 2017 by Prolific Press; Americana won Prize Americana 2013, his third book, published by The Institute for American Studies and Popular Culture; Voyeur, the 2008 Gival Press Poetry Award (Gival Press); and The Apple in the Monkey Tree 2007 (Codhill Press). The poems published here are included in book manuscript Minds of Europe: A Gen.ealogy to The Fat Man. In December, 2016, it was selected as a Beverly Prize short list finalist at Eyewear Publishing.