The Kitchen, 2am Christmas Morning
There’s no poetry in this room
or very little,
only what I brought with me,
field rations if you will,
nourishing but hardly filling.
Poems are like ghosts,
the clingy kind,
the hungry kind,
the kind that yearn to rest
but don’t know how
like me tonight in this kitchen
scrawling on the back of an envelope
a thing I’ve not done in thirty years.
There’re no ghosts here, not yet,
but I sense a neediness which, for now,
will have to do.
Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for fifty years and has graced the pages of many now-defunct literary magazines and websites and a few, like Ink, Sweat and Tears and Poetry Scotland that are still hanging on in there. For ten years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives quietly in Scotland with his wife and, whenever the mood takes him, next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels: Jim, not the cat.
