2019, Moonstone Press
“‘Listen, I’m full of contradictions,'” the speaker in Peter Murphy’s new chapbook confides, but any reader of Murphy’s work already knows that his are poems full of strange truths, deep emotions, and abundant wonder. In Mean Time, the poet takes us on a journey from fantastic myths of self-invention that meld sly, sideways wit, insight and foreboding to urgent investigations and critiques of our current all-too-real reality. It is impossible to say which landscape, which assertion or image, leaves us more mystified and bereft. While time in Mean Time is taken through all of its permutations, what is revealed is both timely and timeless.” ~Kathleen Graber
The Nick of Time
I was conceived in a village whose name
I could not pronounce to parents who turned me
out once I stopped sputtering goo, goo.
I slept in a field and ate horseradish and wild garlic
until soldiers chased me away with their guns.
Nothing makes sense, I thought,
especially how we’re born, how those two
who never loved each other slapped their bodies
together night after night, what for?
When I realized the universe is broken,
I coiled springs to sweep hands across the face
of a clock, and tried to live as if each day
this side of the grave could be a good one.
But then I lost one wife flicked open by a bayonet,
a second who fled into the woods, a third dead
bearing my seed. What I want is redemption
I don’t have to die for. I dig a plot in the earth
and chisel my name into stone. Truth is,
only when I lie down can I stop dreaming.