Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jim Murdoch
Love is…
…inconvenient. Love is untidy. Love is relentless, ruthless and rapacious.
Done well, it’s hilarious, playful and redemptive – Gina Barreca
(for Carrie)
We don’t decide who we love.
Who we hate, yes,
who we’re jealous of,
but never who we end up loving.
It’s not fate or anything—
that would be silly—
but it is out of our control
and often bloody inconvenient.
But, seriously, what do you do?
Love is like a stray dog
that finds its way to your door
that even a cat person can’t turn away.
Jim Murdoch is a Scottish writer living in Cumbernauld. He’s been writing for over fifty years and his list of rejections is voluminous but he keeps at it. He’s written most things over the years—novels, stories, songs, even plays—but he thinks of himself primarily as a poet and is currently producing poems at an unpresented pace. There are worse things to be doing in your sixties.
David I. Hughes
He does not shout. He charts.
Where treaty lines once hung like old nets,
he inks the deep, the dark, the yet-unmade.
Anne Stewart
Huddled on the cat’s blanket,
hyenas crying through the night.
Scribbled notes regretting tea,
Mark Czanik
I loved the tales Luke told me of starving writers,
and the sacrifices they made following their hearts.
Stephen Chappell
She has a way of tilting your head
as if lining up a thought.
Tristan Moss
I try
not to think
about my daughter’s
condition
when I
hug her
Susan J. Atkinson
I tell you my heart is breaking
but the heart has four chambers
and is not shaped like a heart at all
Peter Daniels
No, no one is who they think they are,
nor what we think they are, either:
the demon inside is thinking it
and you can’t tell him.
Paul Stephenson
Like one of those horses
on the carousel
going round and round in circles
sliding up and down a pole
Rob A. Mackenzie
Everything is moving. I have to remind myself
it’s a flat canvas and behind it a wall that’s solid
as I am.