GAS Featured Poet: Jim Murdoch

 

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.

The Curse of Dimensionality

  

…refers to the phenomena of strange/weird things happening as we try to analyse the data in high-dimensional spaces – Swapnil Vishwakarma

  

Poems exist on a page, in the air,

in many minds, as bags of words,

as symbols and ideas within ideas.

  

Poetry exists in five dimensions:

three spatial, one temporal and

one existential.

  

The first four are positional,

either/or or here or there

but meaning is contextual

  

so,

in layman's terms,

it depends.

  

Meanings are not are or are not.

Meanings only ever seem.

Meanings are spooky.

  

And don't get me started

on the observer effect.

  

  

It Takes a Minute To…

  

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago. – Jim Bishop

  

…get started,

make a first impression,

say the Lord’s prayer—twice,

listen to a third of ‘A Fifth of Beethoven,’

figure out where you are

     and what comes next,

make a cup of tea (to fortify yourself),

read a page of Being and Time

     and not understand it,

be silent (in remembrance),

find your feet/phone/groove/voice,

copy 40 words out of Moby Dick

     and maybe understand them,

be the hero,

let the truth sink in,

take out the trash,

water your plants,

feed next door’s cat,

travel 22,000 miles through space,

watch a couple of ads on TV,

ruin a perfectly good relationship

     and have plenty of time to regret it.

Habitus

  

We first make our habits, and then our habits make us 

– John Dryden

  

I see the old man at dawn most days—

mostly dawn, no later than daybreak—

with his plastic bag and downcast eyes.

  

He never picks up anything but sometimes,

sometimes he lingers—no, attends—

and I wonder if he might and he might.

  

He’s sad—sad-looking, at least—or maybe,

maybe I’ve got it all wrong and maybe,

just maybe, it’s the other way round.

  

He’s like a writer wandering about

with a dried-out pen in his pocket.

And no notebook.

  

Or I may be reading way too much

into that damn carrier bag.