RICH MURPHY

Street Smarts

Act 1, Scene 1

Prologos Park

When freedom-fighter change
outsources to the billionaire,
bit-part accomplices walk through
performing a farce with a limp.
How many times does the joke
need telling to the cast before the drama
"Democracy" begins in earnest?

Outside the drive through Laundromat
for the rich the detergent degrees
and association costumes define and own
so that the vocational master loses
to a lifetime bathing in wealth.

The unoccupied bromide factory
where PR wingmen airbrush debt slavery
and empower mammoth differentials
for the corporation and government
entangled in sex under the envy spotlight.

No one should sit down in a seat,
everyone needs to march in the street
shouting "No" to oligarch, homo Deus rule.
Let resentment practice at going without,
shutting down the markets
for the mom and pops.

Act 1 Scene 2

Road Signs

All conduct is economic conduct:
Once I was mine; now I am theirs

No Conrad Grove of Death

All virtue and worth is placed in
a man able to deny himself his own desires,
cross his own inclinations,
and purely follow what reason directs as best,
though the appetite leans the other way…

Out of the society we live in,
the society we want to live in

Reclaim the commons: Ecology, biology,
public spaces, intellectual property

Abandon privatism and seek to share
illumination with the many

It is only one step from the existentialism
of the handicapped to that of acrobats

In experimental art, people are given
the exact specifications
for coming violence to their own psyches
from their own counter-irritants or technology

Fashion something – an object or ourselves –
and drop it into the confusion,
make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force

Society everywhere is a living myth of significance
of human life, a defiant creation of meaning

Courage of hopelessness means not renounce
hope but get rid of the false solutions

Act 1 Scene 3

Home Sapiens

The shadow troupe played at the enlightenment
in Plato Capital Theater,
and now the universal sun welcomes
for the freak and meek:

Acting out and practicing placards
written by witty hands centered
on a shared internalized utopia.
Each foil, ham, extra, and mime
searches for a way to live with authentic talents
that bring stars through stages to homo sapiens.

 

Culture Custodians

 

Who knows how many poets
gather at the cave mouth to change
the light for once fellow prisoners?
The news from a sun brings along
three dimensions, color,
and a horizon rotation that totes now.

An usher army with flashlights
offers to guide the yoked-to-shadows
out to the sublime in practice,
but the jeers threaten from pitch below.

Wobbling upon dictionaries
and history books on a table top,
verse voices twist and shout
while shoulder and eye sockets pop.

A midnight interregnum stretches
until a new mood metaphor moons:
a bat flattened on a granite wall.

 

 

 

 

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