swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

raindrops across the unconscious
Rich Murphy

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Cicada Algorithms

The digital swarm storm sweeps
over screens to enter eyes and ears
and to feed upon all budding thought.
Emoji, jingle, and jingo drool
from lips without fingertips
fertilizing a pen on paper.

Television, the potato dictator,
planted for slugs on couches
and everyone sang along.

The hand-held two-way walkie
pop quiz times along sidewalks,
tracking the steam release
from bugged mirror valves in all fields.

Book lovers and potential philosophers
starve without concepts cropping up
in even the most barren places.

A locust cloud burst blows with hungry
raindrops across the unconscious,
collecting every moment on Earth
until too late for profound good
or for minor change in a mindset.

At the Crossroads

Modern mind-framing relies
on a hammer perhaps
and the handiwork by each
tribe member thrown
into the enlightened landscape.

The road-graded first grade
prepares by pouring attention
on laboratory foundations:
Addition, accumulation,
the quantifiable psyche.

Upon cranium graduation
a mountain peak falls to knees
on mining gravel and the deer
freeze into headlight targets;
the diploma permits.

Ducklings in the business suits
waddle for long lives toward
the Last Man Science Cemetery
or rag-tags play at odd man out
while drawing option architecture.

Poems from Rich Murphy’s collection, “First Aid.”

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Rich Murphy’s poetry has recently appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Experiential-Experimental-Literature (Ukraine), Terror House Magazine (Hungary), Die Leere Mitte (Germany), Neologism Poetry Journal, Word for / Word, West Texas Literary Review, New Note Poetry Journal, Grey Sparrow, Chiron Review, Flatbush Review, and Fractured Ecologies (anthology, Denmark). Prophet Voice Now a book-length collection of essays on poetry and poetics was published in June 2020 from Common Ground Research Network (finalist in the Common Ground research Publishers Prize). Rich Murphy is a guest lecturer and adjunct faculty at MassArt and UMass Boston and on the board at Grid Books.