Young couple's modest apartment,
no children yet,
a crappy mid-size car,
lottery scratch off ticket duds,
grilled cheese and tater tots.
Punching the clock,
factory worker and diner waitress,
workaday life.
Crucifix on living room wall,
sweet Jesus understands,
and loves His toiling ones.
The refrain of September rain,
it's Sunday morning in the city,
coffee and a Mass on t.v.
Factory worker and diner waitress,
the "L" train rumbling by.
Life can be a rhythmic melody,
workaday life.. ~
An admirer of nature, I used to be
‘til a storm felled my favorite tree
Ever-optimistic, my always thoughts
‘til in my first real war I fought
Laid-back and leisurely, I once dined
‘til worn down by the workaday grind
Always thrilled to the sight of flowers
‘til I lived in a windowless tower
The world chews us up and spits us out
Heaven’s surely better, I have no doubt
If my usual wasn't so ordinary
And didn't span great feats of generic
It may just be shy of extraordinary
A mediocrity so bland I'm hysteric
Enormity in normalcy's highest gear
Worked out so hard and never got abs
Without an ear my regular cannot hear
I'm the base tested against in labs
An everyday, workaday, 10 of a kind
Fantastically, head over heels habitual
Frequency, ooze from me, for oddness I pined
This middle of the road, uniform fool
An average in math I lack sum of the fun
My highest point is the peak of just typical
If my usual started with "un", not a prefix of none
This run of the mill status is biblical
I'm routinely symmetrical time and again
Burst at the seams in familiarity
A dullery so wild it verges on zen
Like a quietness without any clarity
I've searched the great depths of the known
Looked for an in but found not a trace
For my explicable or scrutable down to the bone
Destined to be dazzlingly commonplace.
In the heat we burn for Pepsi
dangle feet from crick docks
Traipse with garage ice
to cheap motels,
watch a tv that's chained to a wall,
go home thinner then we came.
Poor possessions, pay-checked and broke
by Monday. Trailer bred,
no stock, just scrawny chickens,
free range ornery strays,
front yards overgrown
with ever grounded flamingo's.
In the cold we work on beat-up trucks
hoody-up, slap oily knuckles together
patch-up holes in our walls.
Go tree coons, play around
separate, divorce, but never leave.
Break open bar fight bottles,
chug-a-lug through the night
by a space heater’s eerie light.
We are not your kind,
we got a right to be low,
slow to show our sickness
our nearness to workaday dirt.
You who drive by radios in your head
masking your hollow conditions,
you keep on down that dusty road
go find your own damn
tumbleweed roots.
I speak of the breast best,
mother Mary and her voiceless love.
My pillow-talk told to doves and divas.
And my voice sounds in the whale bone,
in the thunder of workaday ants in their
Brooklyn bodega’s.
The breathless, the brazen
those who bargain and barter
their marketplace musical masterpieces,
let them unsling all vocal vending’s
be they sharp or velvet
in a caroling of living daylights.
Talk is dirt, let our mute fingers plow;
what we say, we say beneath the light
where ancient suns still lay voiceless.
I am a penny opera, you are the
song of the earth, my throat
swallows words
turns them into raw diamonds
for your cleaving,
facets you polish
with chorus and chant.
Where you echo I follow
washing my face in
your timbre and tone.
Deliver us plain into a Voice,
one chord struck as clear
as a chisels gleaming cut.
Utter me in your tongue
and I will croon you in the womb
where a common blood speaks.
Proclaim your revelations in a simple song,
an anthem for us to pray
at the end of our tolerable,
unsung days.
It took some time, but
eventually the denim
(after much scrubbing)
of my workaday soul
cleaned-up as if stone washed.
Valuable lessons
were tucked into new pockets,
the clucking hens
of a nagging conscience
were at last silenced.
I’m spinning myself dry today,
hanging up my smoking guns.
Her face still riddles me through,
but I patch up just fine,
and know now how to zip her
out of my mind.
Words,verbs,adjectives,aimless,past times made present, amalgams of verse unshaped,until imagination's birth bursts from the spring of my maturity to awake,arise as ideas and fly free on imagination's unfettered wings ,blown to and fro to settle where they will with nowhere to hide, buried deep within long forgotten dreams until becoming clear ,as words floating like petals on a stream;a fragrance that lingers within, as a passage of light to my soul, inspiration to make me whole.. delineated as a pattern of thought ,a ribbon of inspiration as a verse.
Suh tumultuous discussions within ,these images strive for life just as a new-born wriggles from the womb. I merely provide the mute, as multiplied, thoughts trained by the subconscious becomes a workaday drama.The inner made outer.Inherent originality conceived,perceived,crystallised, beneath the now ..in relief.
Here’s to those who, late in life,
Might cultivate a skill,
A goal which, years ago, they never
Thought they could fulfill.
It might be blowing glass
Or playing chess or learning French
Or any of a hundred other
Thirsts that time can quench.
For those no longer shackled to
The workaday routine
Have the luxury of tapping
Some yet undetected gene.
And no matter if it’s music
Or athletics or the arts,
There is no age too old for what
Enlightenment imparts.
Brexit Sonnet No. 41
‘Austria, not Australia!’
I’m Mad to the Max, brimmed full with deep disgust.
So who’s on the bike and who’s in the car with the grunt?
Who’s the guy that is good, is it he that is heavily trussed,
Or shot in the leg, or dragged down the road for a stunt?
This violent dystopian vision we’ve seen acted out,
Let’s not play it for real with choices we now have to make.
No leather clad hero our Minister with Exiting shout,
His workaday car, no vibrating V8 doth shake.
Rockatansky’s our man, whilst beastly beast doth prowl,
This Brexit Road, paved not with gold, but hate.
So maybe Mad Max is not our future foul.
So dear Uncle Max, tell now of future fate?
‘Your Sound of Brexit Music will end just like mine,
In a world maxed on evil, where the sun omits to shine.’
©Keith Murphy
The fault lies within ourselves”
The tearing down of a person
A breaking of the Spirit
The ruining of self
Infliction by other person’s words
Growing up among the abandoned buildings
Once thriving with production
They became empty
The soul seen through broken windows
Cold and damp
Waiting to be torn down
Stripped of its resources for pennies.
Until there’s nothing left
An empty shell
Set it a blaze
Until it’s nothing but ash.
Then cry over the empty space
Remember it when it was a productive enterprise
Forgetting about the time it was empty,“Don't scorn your life just because it's not dramatic, or it's impoverished, or it looks dull, or it's workaday. Don't scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you've got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open." Philip Levine
This poem emphasis on a person who died and was cremated.It also depicts how people cry after they destroyed the spirit of that person. The building is the person. It's dedicated to my brother Danny,
The morning sun just rising, glaring;
a damp, colder, workaday street ...
fallen leaves scattered,
Halloween mere days away:
Suddenly: Startled by the workman:
A stray, jet-black cat
frightenedly slinking into utter darkness
under a nearby porch.
In the gloom, the cat all but disappears,
save for its wide, pained, wild eyes
staring back threateningly into the daylight:
Disembodied eyes illumined,
like molten gold blazing,
dancing and hovering in gloom;
eyes winking on and off,
twin, sinister lamps,
the brightest, most moribund yellow:
The cat glancing aside, this way, that.
And irridescence
hanging in the hushed air
about all and sundry,
an apparition,
fog slowly vanishes.
Love Along the Lake
Along the lake,
Gentle water lapping
Twinkling white caps splashing,
Duck wings flapping;
In a brilliant sunset strolling,
Arm in arm a workaday away;
The trill of laughter low and sweet,
I love you, so easily, you did say.
And I, I fell
As hard as the path stones and
Gave you my heart.
Seemingly some kind of Message to
All and sundry about:
The colossal crimson sun imperceptibly sinks over the horizon,
Sinks beyond the road here, over the park in the
Debilitating, gritty summer heat.
Nearby, a huge silent hairy golden dragonfly,
As large as a fully grown man's hand,
Unexpectedly swings down from above.
The dragonfly hovers for a moment,
Then effortlessly, closely paces a car suddenly passing by,
One filled with aching sore-tired workmen.
They are oblivious to
The mute insect "spy" outside the car's windows,
Just as they are now oblivious to all:
Exhausted, the men have done their workaday work well.
Then just as suddenly as the dragonfly first appeared,
It shoots straight upward,
Disappearing.
Nearby, drained, workaday faces pass by:
Working people with working class woe:
Faces bent in suffering, near hopelessness, made indiscriminate rue.
But turn on the car radio as the people pass by within earshot:
Music escaping from the radio,
Like the paradisal bird escaping from the
Proverbial gilded cage:
The otherworldly, mesmerisingly liberating rock, blues, jazz, and
Poetry of the Doors;
The antic, agonized meditations and harmonies, the unfettered idealism and
Humanity, the driving, rocking rhythm of the songs of John Lennon;
The rustic, soaring harmonies, the heartfelt, universal humanity of the
"Cosmic American Music" of LA "rhinestone cowboy" Gram Parsons:
Working class faces passing by, suddenly smiling, happy looking for
The first time that day, Spirit enduring, Victory assured.
Mute and multiplied,thoughts trained
and tamer,the subconscious becomes
a workaday drama.A confusion then
evolves into the particular and floats
upon my page.
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