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.
Lesley Burt
There’s a house in a suburb of between-the-wars pebble-dash & bay windows, where the soundtrack is sighs, tuts & bellows, the clash of plates & jangle of cutlery.
Gabrielle Meadows
She gets into your bed
like when she was little.
Flowers grow out of the wardrobe,
moss claims the windowsill
Alice Huntley
I had a leaf in my hair when I arrived
the receptionist thought it was a hairclip
Gemma Blakeley
My Dad Complains That The Hedges Are Overgrown
and the word bemuses me, implying as it does
the concept of excess in what can only be good.
Nick Cooke
Molluscous receivers, would that you could
turn your talents inwards, and pick up
all that goes on in the cerebral swamp . . .
Luke Moran
There’s a
flash of colour
from the hedge.
Cáit O’Neill McCullagh
And when you step into the clearing
there will be dancing. The unsteady moon, shaken
to ribbon; shimmering through regalia of clouds.
Adam Cairns
A buzzard mews, turns in the wind,
a faraway engine grumbles.
Siân Bentham
She doesn’t know what she is doing.
She chops and boils, snacks and sneezes, sits.
Classical radio plays, imbuing
the scene with comic dignity and wit.