Somewhere in the World it’s Now O’clock

by Jim Murdoch

Somewhere it’s raining.
I suppose.
I suppose somewhere it’s Tuesday too
or at least Tuesday’s been there.

Perhaps one of those Tuesdays it rained.
A rainy Tuesday, yes. Say in May.
I wonder when the first Tuesday was.
I could’ve been a Wednesday.

It won’t rain forever. Of course not, no,
nor will it be Tuesday forever or May
and for some people it will never rain
or be Tuesday or May again. Ever.

I feel something going on here,
something vaguely poetic.
I’m just not getting it.
Are you getting it?

Maybe we should wait until May
to do this and pray for rain.
It might make more sense then. Or some.
What if we read it in the rain?

Now that sounds like a plan.

Synergy Pie

These words are for you.
I cannot return the ones you gave me—
      they’ve been savoured away to nothing—
but I do hope these will do.
“A balanced mix of nouns, verbs, adverbs,
adjectives and popular conjunctions.”

Either way it’s not what words say or said—
      they can be made to say about anything—
or even what they meant or came to mean—
      meaning, like seasoning, favours a light touch—
it’s that they were (in the then)
and we are aware (in the now) of their… of their…

A recipe is not a formula—
      a pinch of x and a dash of y—
nor is it a road map or a rubric.
Sometimes we get it so right, so right,
and othertimes we bake ourselves into a corner.

Boring Poem

I meant to bring my anger to this poem
but by mistake I let my boredom in and
by the time I realised it was too late,
I’d begun writing this.

I have tried palming him off on others but
they’ve enough with their own boredoms.
Boredoms bond for life as you know and
mine is especially clingy.

That aside he’s your bog-standard boredom.
I did once try to teach him ennui but he just
rolled over and played dead, his party trick
often topped off with a fart.

Since this was to be his first time in a poem
I asked him to “at least try to feign interest.
I mean,” I said, “it’s one soddin’ step up from
pretending to be dead.”

So, no surprises how that played out.
We have a… complicated relationship but I
wouldn’t be without him. He’s like my spleen.
I’ve no idea what it does

but I wouldn’t have one if I didn’t need one.

BIO

Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for fifty years and has graced the pages of many now-defunct—and a few non-defunct—literary magazines and websites. For ten years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives quietly in Scotland with his wife and, whenever the mood takes him, next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels: Jim, not the cat.