Sheila Murphy
Lauds (9)


Tip o' the anger, I'm ignited after all (encore)
And the sky is part of a conspiracy to Midwesternize all Maricopa County
In a huff of prayer, I see the microbes of infuriation singe my life back into motion
Wind is pale and life goes stuttering right forward
Paid staff twirl their paraphernalia while I watch detatched
About to limber up a new pen with non-reprehensible drawing
Thinking why do I not feel
And then I do, I feel frustration rapture
I go back to sleeping with you while the green tea steeps
And I consume morning Americano to even the score of my tap shoes
On the pavement along Indian School Road
Sunday stretched into the weeklong realization that we're (all of us)
Present, accounted for, and situationally ethical,
We're breezy and we're fun-
Dam(ental)(ly)
Way good and long elastic (quite)
Into the zone of referenda and perturbing
Holdups quicksand foreign bodies into observable stasis
Anyone can come and pour redaction on my manuscript
And anyone can cast a pall without her B12 shots
And anyone can love her neighbor quietly
And anyone can find a thing to praise
After the barn is raised
The kids can phrase their homework into many languages
Each one with a drive-by audience of fascinating, fascinated
People on the go (not on the run) and room to glow
Is patched across the two-point-oh release of thunder
Right where the spirit plopped it
(We're not talking Michigan, we're talking vitam eternam
Rest in peace, amen).




Lauds (11)


Allow the meantime rain to wash this habitat and circumstance
Made blond by morning so that we might parse secular dividends
And allocate uneven heart light as if to have been indisposed
Would guarantee transfer-of-sadness into a routine
That turns to maturation of each undiscovered miracle
Before receding into a reciprocal delicion

When I talk to you I hear anti-depressant slivers
Take down your voice so its incessant melody
Begins to lie still as a sacrament and I have something
To worship all over
Again alongside lifetimes of reflexive architectural
Hovering

Why can't we photograph the future, that we might
Learn what to keep before it has arrived and gone
To seed like most offspring and the very thought of them
Becoming duplicative memories on the very cusp
Of dismay before it gets out
That warm waves we used to thing about
Could spoil a season leaving us
Little to eat too much to earn and nonexistent places
We might walk and learn and pluck habitual sacrifice
Out of the life