My poems have been published widely in such journals as Rolling Stone, Poetry Magazine, Grand Street, New Letters, Negative Capability, 
Confrontation Magazine, ForPoetry, Barrelhouse Review, For Poetry, West 47 (Ireland), Aesthetica Review (England), Chimera (England), 
New Delta Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Creature, Inertia Magazine (www.inertiamagazine.com), and Voltaire’s Inkwell 
(http://www.voltairesinkwell.com/Murphy.html). My essay “Vanishing Artist: American Poet and Differend” was published in Fulcrum: 
An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics and again in The International Journal of the Humanities. A second essay “McLuhan’s Warning, 
Frye’s Strategy, Emerson’s Dream” was published in the latest issue of the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning. 
A third essay is titled “Spectacle and Aporia in the Poetry of Kooser and Ashbery.” My essay “Howl’s Muzzle” appeared in the April issue of Fringe Magazine.
Great Grandfather, a chapbook, was published by Pudding House.


 


 

The Cameo Crowd


Programmed to fail by parents, schools, 
city planners, the communities of learned
helplessness take on the dangerous duty
of war, fast food, and alcohol. With circuits

ripped from their boards by an earlier
generation of family members, the children
of second and third chances burn down 
houses from which they cannot escape.

The police departments teach every lesson 
learned by the students of sacrifice. Honored
at military funerals, mythologized by fellow
revelers, who laughed, pointed fingers,

and went off to college, the chain-smoking
gang huddled outside city hall digs any hole 
needing to be dug and stands, the blueprint’s 
foundation of someone else’s urban sprawl.



The Narcissuses 


Looking up into their mirror 
to straighten ties or apply lipstick 
vanity’s vagabonds gauge their goodness.
Wearing Sunday’s best in the middle of the week,
distracts the clowns of ribbons and strings 
from the list of their burning desires 
chipped into stone tablets.
With alcohol and financial loopholes, 
the torturers douse  
long tongues of fire echoing curses in ears.
When no one was looking,
except the fairest of them all, 
the flagellators whip orgasms from penitents.
Cops chase Volkswagen Beetles through the cities
and unpack them in front of churches each time.  
High priests of street people give up
only to watch their investments
squirt from a pigeon’s ass.
The egotists, who reflect a moment 
with their eyes closed, see, 
then recognize the lions, tigers, and curtain.
And when the human’s of straw and tin
locate the technology, 
they embark on a new adventure
with a smile that allows them 
to clean their teeth of feathers.



Calamity’s Colossus


Filled to its eyeballs with testosterone,
the utopian trophy stands just outside the city,
where citizens of peace and justice plot
its progress to their square. 

The men of the town in their loose 
horse-hair costume wait quietly for the orgasm.

But when celebration’s cask spills guns and guts 
around the laurel and brass, surprise 
even grips the children. 
Carrying a bucket of estrogen and a crutch
women respond with alarm.

After sexual domination’s snow globe
empties, the scent of satisfaction
fills the air dressed in a promise of change.

Expectations grow greater and greater.

History’s crystal balls, 
hanging between the legs of biology, 
bring Earth into focus.