poems from Murray

I did my final residency for my MFA last week, so I've been spending this week working on revisions.  I'll have more revisions coming next week (I hope), as I get ready to send off the first draft of my thesis to my mentor.  I'm not going to post the originals of these, as some of them barely resemble these and some of them would have several drafts at this point.  However, any and all feedback is appreciated.  Thanks for reading.

Jack Has Not Outgrown Everything

The night I turned ten, I felt the weight
of a life with double digits, despite
being surrounded by Star Wars sheets,
a lightsaber on the table beside
me. Perhaps it was because I had learned
that even Darth Vader could die. Perhaps
it was because my friends spoke of funerals,

where sisters who had punched them, pulled their hair
would cry over their coffins, and cousins
who had left them out of their games of hide
and seek or ghosts in the graveyard would now
regret every moment of fun they had
ever had. I thought such feelings were like
the puberty teenagers talked about,

something to be passed through, gotten over
by the time I turned twenty. When I turned
ten, I was told to let my imaginary
friends—Timmy and Tommy, the twins—fade away,
but they grew up with me, got jobs working
the graveyard shift, spend weekends on the couch,
watch basketball, always cheer for the underdog.


Jack Receives Spam Promising an Enhancement Bonus

I know I’ve lost a little spring,
left behind the half-step in the half-court,
one of my many moves I once had,
left it like it was nothing more than my high school

yearbook from my freshman year, chosen
Most Likely to Succeed, posed for the picture.
My peers paired me with the geekiest girl,
the one who worked on physics on the bus,

calculated vectors and force while we
made ice into projectiles, launched them
from open windows, measured the force
of our fun. She wore her best black dress,

a silver bow in the back matched her braces;
my tie, slightly loosened, as thin as her lips,
my jacket as blue as the Miami Vice
sky, my smile as bright as my condescension.

She wrote beside our picture in handwriting
that looped around our names: Stay true to yourself
and you’ll go far. But I know no pill
or powder will give me the frisson

I felt following fourteen-point quarter
or when whatever girlfriend I was with
giggled like every other girl I knew,
touched my arm, told me I was too much,
just too much.


Jack Practices Diplomacy

I have given away a lifetime of lives
already, traded ten years in a teenage
auto accident, wanted to watch my parents
retire, sit outside a condo in Cancun,
tell embarrassing stories about my siblings

and me, at least. And when my gall bladder
gave out in my early thirties—thought I
was having a heart attack or someone
had found a way to adjust my aorta

with a crescent wrench—I told it to take
twenty, even thirty years, just for five
more, maybe ten. But now I have found
my forties, know my end is inevitable,

if not as near as I feel, I have changed
my approach, send diplomats to death
like a dad in a divorce does lawyers,
thinking only, Not the children. Please,
not the children, anymore.


What Jack Refuses to Focus On

His father’s fall as he went to the mailbox
one morning; shelves of Lean Cuisine spaghetti,
lasagna, French bread pizza, chicken with sugar
snap peas, devil’s food cake, banana pudding,
cherries jubilee; reports he did not run

on Friday afternoon, Monday morning
starts at six; a new location for Lowe’s,
built on land where his elementary
school spread out for sixty-two years before
the bigger one was built on highway

64; the water stain on the seventh
ceiling tile, resembles Florida, maybe
Maryland; his spin move to the basket
that still works, most of the time, the way his back
feels the following day, reminding him

how he should have said no when his friends forced
him to play; the doctor’s appointment
his HMO makes for him, as if his mother
still scheduled his life; plaid slippers his father
once wore to pick up the paper every
morning, the right one always slightly in front

of the left, as if eager to see what had
happened over night; the twenty-four-year-old
in the office down the hall, whose ideas move
women and men toward him, move management
to notice him, not others; computers that can do taxes
while playing chess and carrying on

a conversation; the barking cough that couldn’t
be cancer; the forty-six-year-old police
officer who had a heart attack while walking
his dog—reporters said what they always say:
completely unexpected, unpredictable,
no one saw this coming, had just been to


the doctor; the CPA exam he failed
five times; Hackney Distribution’s account
he has been unable to balance for two
months, stares at columns so long they slide from side
to side like his childhood television

when the vertical hold went out; finding
his mother’s hearing aids in the kitchen
trash, just beneath a banana she only ate
half of; the scar on Ryan’s skull; the metallic
ping knocking on the underside of his hood.