MARK A. MURPHY - POEMS

Mark A. Murphy was born in 1969 in the UK. His poetry publications include Tin Cat Alley (1996), Our Little Bit of Immortality (2011), Night-watch Man & Muse (2013) and his next full length collections, Night Wanderer’s Plea and The Ontological Constant are pending from Waterloo Press in the UK and LitFest Press in the States respectively. He has been published in 18 countries in over 190 magazines and ezines. He is currently looking for a publisher for his next collection, Little Known Aphorisms.

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Meaning(less) Haibun
​

​What we are running from, or to, is hard to say,
but we’re all, more or less, running
in the same direction. Certainly, we humans
are adept at running away –
 
down the street,
 
up the stairs, to the end of the road, towards devilry
and damnation, since beatification is not an option
for the many.
 
So we move through the fair with an air of desperation
about us and the garish lights and speeding carriages
and smell of fast food is all too much to take, so we begin
to run again headlong into the next debacle.
 
Sometimes faith abandons us and we are like children
again searching for meaning, except we find we are
meaning less each day, and wholly meaningless at the end
of days, given the scope of our local universe and Godless
abandonment.
 
Meaninglessness is both
blessing and curse
when living a deadly lie.

​No One Gets Out of Here Alive

One day you find your self alone in A & E, your throat so constricted
that you can’t swallow or breathe to save your life. At this most
unpropitious of times, you make your request to the operating surgeon,
in the event of my passing, Do Not Resuscitate. There’s no self-pity
in this resolution, only a sense that one doesn’t want any more pain.
One can only pay testament to the notion that one wishes in some way
to control one’s own demise. You have no choice about being born,
but no one has the right to inform you of when it’s your time to go.
As your grandfather would say:
 
when you’re dead, you’re very, very dead! 
​

Phantasmagoria Haibun
​

​It is entirely possible that the Brahmin doctor in the ICU, having lost
her patient, is out to kill you, take your life for his. Hallucinations
clamour inside the head, the heady mix of final chemicals flooding
the brain is enough to render you delusional. You are unable to rationalise
your exit, the nurses are discussing your options, now the ward team
are voting on life or death. You figure at least three of these bastards
want you dead. You hear them conspiring in the ward, you are too weak
to move. One nurse pleads on your behalf, this man is too young
to die, he is from a poor family, his parents can’t afford to bury him.
The Brahmin doctor is preparing to administer a lethal injection to stop
the heart. You feel utterly alone. Now there is nothing left but to force
the brain to stay awake till daylight comes, watch the vultures close up,
as if in a dream. The peewits are in full voice outside the ICU –
 
they’re calling on you
to pass, as if to steal
your soul for themselves.
 

October Haibun
​

​i.m. Paul Randall
 
Death is palpable, we taste it in the air –
the leaves turn
in the wind, carrying our sorrows
down the valleys, up and out past Jackroyd Lane
where your mother is weeping.
 
One hundred years on since the Bolshevik Revolution
and the world of extremes is none-the-wiser. In later life
we seldom spoke of our youthful activism, our passion
for the cause of humanity, or how we came to meet,
only that we were firm friends, comrades by ’88
at the Alexandra Palace rally where we undressed
a thousand girls in the heat, listened and applauded
Esteban Volkov (live from Coyoacan, via satellite link up)
as if the revolution was just within reach, as if the old man
was Trotsky himself. We never knew then a lifetime later
we’d still be waiting. What happens to time over time
is that it becomes a byword for failure, the hopes of youth
become bookish, nothing more than an exercise on paper,
ten days that shook the world.
 
So the moon rallies
in the October night,
cries us all to sleep.