Miguel Murphy is the author of a collection of poems, A Book Called Rats. He lives in Venice Beach, California.
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Miguel Murphy Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand
One thing I became aware of at a relatively young age is that we are stuck in our bodies. I don’t mean that we’re separate from the body we live in, though it feels like that sometimes. We’re inseparable from our bodies in many ways, but we can control our bodies only to a limited extent. Our bodies affect our moods, our cravings, our desires, our perspectives… One thing I love about these poems is that this reality is screaming through them. Different people have different relationships with their bodies. How would you characterize your relationship to your body, or the way you understand it? How does this affect you as a poet?
Oh I go for Whitman in this regard. Hankering, gross, mystical, nude. One of the roughs—disorderly fleshy and sensual, eating and drinking and breeding—the journeywork of stars. I’ll take that. Also angry, falling apart in a hell of awareness. I think about the torment of the body that listens to what Beckett called a dirty story, told at some colossal pitch of pure smut, the bawdy innuendo of eternity that beats at this moment in vain against our eardrum. Then there’s Ernest Becker who wrote this brilliant book published the year I was born, 1974, The Denial of Death, in which he says something like our basic nature is paradoxical, being half-animal, half-symbol, simultaneously worms and gods, gods with anuses. We watch ourselves defecate. I like a lot of gender criticism that thinks about the body as a filter for the world, in which the whole tiresome palimpsest of self-identities is important. I like Audre Lorde saying, I am a Black Lesbian Woman Poet with Cancer. I think about having a body and I’m furiously pissed off. Also enormously thrilled. It’s a terrible joy, blood against cold space.
To sing is a species of revenge. As a poet, I lock myself up to be unapologetically alone. This is my small rebellion. Capricorn in Exile is my earthly norm.
In your poems, you use risky phrases that could make less highly-crafted poems fall flat. For instance, the lines “when the rains of despair overwhelmed / even the ancient goodness of your voice” in the poem “Banishment of Rain in the Heart’s Blue Mesquite” could, in another poem, sound abstract and overly dramatic. But in your work, lines like these work – it seems to me –because the emotional undertow pulls the reader through them, and they end up adding to that undertow, making the poem sound epic. Could you give us some insight into how you make this work?
I’m not sure it does work. I know I want music more than anything, so I have to really work hard at having narrative, an anchor, vulnerability. The journalism of most poetry bores me to death. But so does overly conceptual work. I want to be spoken to, in a way that never happens in real life, but in a way I need. I don't need a poem to be smart. But I do need an intimacy. It's a risk, to speak to the reader in a tender and honest way without abandoning the obvious brutality of life. Clarice Lispector, Jean Genet. These are my favorite poets, even though they're writing novels. I can't get through a single page of their work without feeling that I'm being held and struck down at the same time. I want that, a conversational privacy filled with horor and longing.
At some point, I realized that I have separation anxiety. I’m getting better about temporary separation, but permanent separation is still horrifying. In the poems you’re sharing with us here, you’ve tapped into my greatest fear: separation from the person I love the most. The emotional pull in your poems is astonishing, like the ocean sucking us out to sea. Would you share with us the (emotional / chronological) place from which you wrote these poems?
The immediate emotion of the poem is an invention, but I’d also say the poem is a kind of monument, or feeble testament to a feeling that is lost. Life is so painfully boring, all these silly things that happen. Who’d you sleep with, who’s pissing you off in traffic, if you like sushi. It’s endless Reality TV. Everyone is dispensable, like everyone else. But there are those moments for me that stay, those images I can’t get free of, the after-image of some lived moment. I’m not sure how to talk about feeling, though the occasions are pretty clear: the death of a bee, a letter to a sick lover, a toothache, therapy, a medical procedure. See? Hella boring. Nobody cares. I don’t know if the poems are successful, but the attention in them is to the feeling of an experience, and that’s more elusive.
I want to steal something back from the Abyss, or commit some violence against it. Have you seen the photograph of Earth from the outer rings of Saturn? The best poem is probably a suicide, but so far I’m a coward.
What is your greatest fear?
Do Not Resuscitate.
I saw online that you live in one of the most interesting places I’ve been to: Venice Beach! What’s it like to live there? Will you share a story about an experience there?
My spot is right in the crescent between the Venice Pier, the marina jetty to the south and Malibu to the north. Winter sunsets over the ocean, summer over the Santa Monica Mountains. Some days the moon hangs full to the south over the Catalinas while the sun is still on its descent over the palm trees between Small World Books and Breeze and Brooks and Sunset and Dudley and Rose Avenues, then off to the Palisades. The panorama is like nowhere else, it’s dirty, wild, clamoring, vast. Absence here is urge. The sun hangs on our heads. The beach is our church. The locals wear flip-flops and board shorts year round. The homeless and their dogs are on a first name basis with the cops. My favorite time of year is winter when the boardwalk slows and the chilly beaches burn. The surfers climb out of their wet leather like amphibian moonwalkers. Dolphins daily. Outside my window a eucalyptus speaks to the sea and I can walk or skateboard or ride my beach cruiser to 6 coffee shops, Cow’s End on Washington, 3 Square Bakery on Abbot Kinney, Café Cielo on Main Street. I walk my dog through the canals. I work out at Gold’s. I touch Angelica Houston’s wall. I buy my flowers at four farmer’s markets each week and the whole year is summer. Holy Guacamole’s, or I grab a slice of pizza at Abbott’s and do the RoosterFish until I’m bored. I cruise the lifeguard tower at Ocean Park and Pacific, watching the Ferris Wheel after midnight. I ride up the back alley alone in a briny starlight. It's Dogtown. It's home.
For you, what is (or what should be) the intersection between poetry and politics and/or pornography/sexuality?
Poetry is a private act meant for privacy. I’d say it intersects politics when someone reads a poem alone and no longer feels alone. When I read Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language, being a gay person is validated in a palpable, triumphant way. I’m made legitimate, in a way I recognize in myself, even if the political world is still in a ridiculous childish debate over a question of sin, and marriage, and a definition of the family, and the responsibility of the state, red values and blue values, and God. The poem is alive in private, and its liberty exists like the body’s—it supersedes political debate, religious doctrine, the law. Poetry is unsaid truth.
Publishing is porn.
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Banishment of Rain in the Heart’s Blue Mesquite
Rain like no other
moss you’ve ever slept on & drank
lain down on and wept for your life, your body
clenched by dark opposition, washed,
ravished by desire’s anonymous hoof & claw. You
called to tell me the negation: positive. In dreams
I see you trailing the procession, waiting
for death’s acrid cross to be
ashed onto your forehead, thumbed,
carboned, charcoaled, sacredly drawn
by interns who whisper & condemn,
you forced to bear scrutinies of the seemingly immortal
eyes, like those that move & feign desire
silently over the shoulder of an armless Greek
statue—lippy, conservative, pursing
gossip. We share this
only clover of friendship, the olive
of our passions now past. I loved you, I love you, Thistlehead,
Poor Archer, Moon-Apple. Bur. And to listen
when the rains of despair overwhelmed
even the ancient goodness of your voice
I lay in bed and longed for your life.
I listened to one
blind bird in the blue Mesquite—its serious
effort like my effort, my want: this little
brother of cellos, dwarf swallow, this one
blue breast at night, wild & undoing
itself with long ladders of hard song:
You swan in the night, and me blind night.
You fire in the chest, and me black tinder.
You impossible
orange blossom, and me dark dog scavenging the heaps.
Sweet blue drink
and—sickness without relief. Why can’t we?
I craved another
beauty for your sickness: AIDS:
“I can’t even look
my face in the mirror.”
As if the mirror of the Self craved shame.
No good: You in your room with blood’s
Mirrors, you without your
Life whistle not in these black waters
And the rain of the face And the world’s embrace
The same
apocalyptic static: But here, I want to remember nights deathless &
without anonymity. Want—why can’t we?
We met:
midnight in July & I followed you to a room
lit secretly by The porn house video screen, its waters fastening
& unfastening the flashing helixes of our eyes our limbs
offering to a Real Light our skin
offering to Real Light
real eyes: the shining private—
You in your body like the green
stalk in the shrine, me in mine like salt, cut rain
Why can’t we?
Not calamity Not the shineless facts I choose Memory:
I put once my hand in his shirt of hair and it felt like I slept through summer
blonde waves of tall grasses, our shrines
our curls up like two sails
two sightless wrecks between us
& words that passed from lips to lips & promises their starlight
made proudly neck-straight soldierly
our kissing
made with necessity a tyrannical sea’s leaving
& return, root-hair dangling from his chin his mouth
agape the odor
cigarette mint & absence undressed with masculine prancing
& burying like the promises of governments & graves—
And I wanted to touch something small birthmark or imperfection mole
nipple scar fetlock curl across his brow
Mine his tender arrowhead droplet
nape lip button coin
lightly bitten then devoured knuckle lobe foreskin
hole Departing & Grasping
promises, but then before & without winter Why can’t we?
I spoke with you & we tasted our body’s
moneys Yes
slavery & promises let me tell you again: I love you I loved you
& still
it was in you horror
in love with inner agony and pain—
After the phone call After the shock of consequences
you drank the cocktails & gulped the pill-feasts
Not you but pieces
of you piloting disease spreading apathy’s slack Why? But you do—
dark-honeying heartbeat, feeling & synapse
systole diastole still
alive & each night’s a postponement
without remorse—saliva sinew semen urine & lightning
marrowy skies we’ll watch
together the scrawling of white missives on our skin—
I am here I am still here, do you hear me?
Despite the word, die.—Don’t
ask me why we can’t go back
together—as if the world never happened.
What was Time?
Miserable
Beauty that will never come back, never return
& exist again between us. Now
merciless, the distance spreads its windfall
gutting our embrace
your life as far from mine as a city I’ve never visited
& won’t, I’m sorry. I can’t. Even if I believed
the past is not too late, I wrote
this to cross & to remember & to hold again
despite my wingless heartbroken faith
morning’s gold pout & our bedroom rule of nudity & early
breath of sour pears & dreamspeak,
bees’ dully zeroing the windows. . .
I mailed them—the stamp of my country & real burning
prayer on you like swift need and terrible postage
the heart’s blue monument holding her torch high
as if love were liberty it is not
as if love could save it cannot
as if fate were not tragedy when it
deliberately separates true arrows
from vibrating in their hit, their dark mark, their
stain on the brain of the beloved.
Music like pain wants to live
in memory, in flesh, in the black & sacred
skulls of The Nothing That Is & We Become: black-balled
betrayed, ransacked, agonized,
cared for and astonished—left without fever
the longing so hard our jaws
lock, our bones crack
we break brittle gulls and purple moths—
The swallow piercing night
invisibly with its libretto like the soul of the Mesquite tree
perilously through the rain:
Why can’t we? You awakened in your body & eaten your breath
mauled by inner darkness your personal grief deliberately pure
teeth-white nail-yellow & undercurled skeletal
crooked finger dried Pasque blossom ring hair & muslin
cheekbones the intolerable emblems of
sleep & permanence—
Why can’t we? Me in mine awake & listening After your imperishable
song, your sobbing, the little cello of your blood
& the flat hush of rain outside
the body, outside
truth, writing to remind you I will neither abandon you nor leave:
Want—why can’t we?
What is this world, what is love
if the scream of being
in its river, its eternal choral crash
growing enviously green
with envy at all that lives
will not rest, will not again return
to the world in the boat that once it loved—
Feel It Splinter
Feel it as it darkly drips & floods
a tooth-ache a small pain to keep the time
Feel it clock of absolute silence
the fiery licks
it will take to trick this skin off
this mind feel it
Red-dark & daring
To remind me always is always ending
like a bad memory in the future
I woke without you
Wanting to kiss you wanting oblivion
Dribbling down all alone
But for the bare moon broken
like a dim chandelier in the eucalyptus
And moaning in the palm trees
Ripping themselves sweetly in this darkness
Hear it the sea pulse in and
empty. Carve like the night my ancient bone.
A weight in my skull Feel it Splinter
like the half-lit litanies of copernicium
Feel it the painful honey of a sunset
Paradise & painkiller
each and every second of the night
blowtorched into my gravedark jaw
Lorca
What did I want to witness
More than the blackness I hated
Like a permanent silence
Inside my own skull? In the shade
Underneath the flowering
Fiery roses, the dying bee
On the concrete sidewalk in an agony
Flickering like a painful lamp
Against darkness, little furnace—Myself.
I wanted to welcome this
Music—to save what I could not see—
Smash with a stone, or to grind with my heel
The body’s final angry burning—
The center of your last great movements
The cold grass short and stiff and dark thorns
Piercing the beach mist. I stopped for you,
I stopped and listened and watched while you died
And heard a black ocean in the distance—
A single drop of blood, wildly burning. Manic
Scimitar of your twitching, I stopped for you
Like stopping for myself in someone else’s future.
Gypsy. Picked Seed.
Perishing, plucked hearse. Blackish & deliberate.
Failing and persistent and musical—
Like the hand of a guitarist
Plucking the invisible—Little Spasming
Ripped Wing, your only instrument
in a minor nocturne for sunlight and wind.
Colonoscopy
I don’t know the apple
of my insides. Is it fire
or guts? Is it opening
Rose? Is it unfolding
the many burning thresholds
of the body’s inner doom, red
and endless? Am I coming? Am I caverns
of closed flesh pulled back? Are the doors
diminishing, flying apart, tearing at
the dire ruby like flayed shadow
a wine-dark dawn? Are they hands, wings
of the struggle—urge before flight? Am I
a question endlessly
welcomed, sung to, abandoned, loved
by name—or like this, tightly folded
and forgotten? Are they waves
where I wake
do I wake
only once? Is the mind the night?
Is the body silent, is it
shedding itself to reveal
the opposite of never, the star—
Is my voice peering into
the broken bright center where it pours?
Am I in the memory of who I am
already, am I shining
seed buried inside
another shining seed?
Is my father walking through me, like he used to
wearing his military blue suit?
Is home where my mother keeps, like an angry bird
singing me my name, calling hijo, mijo,
hijo, like some sweet, sad stranger
out of her past? Are we children?
Am I new? Am I risen like an answer
asleep in the marrow, am I perfume?
Will I walk like a constellation turned inside-out
with hunger?—What if I cut into the apple,
will my nothing bleed? Is it white
and calciferous? Is my death
beautiful, the rising
green Earth’s philosophy? Is it daylight? Is my body
alone in this likeness, rabid
sack of moonful organs? Isn’t the heart
tendentious, cruel, math-like, exact,
questioning itself to be? to be? to not to be?
O tireless calculations—I can see into
dirt and heat
the two directions of the end
of my story, can I sleep now? Wordless
World, where will I begin?
Will I dream
another or this same wakefulness? Inner
Body, you are answerless—
But, who else can I speak to?
Where else is there to live?
Couple’s Therapy
We follow the psychologist upstairs to the attic
to summon the chemistry of a phantom.
Suns, human guts, rages and punishments,
we don’t know why. We don’t know why
we’re so thirsty. The shrink’s face is silent
like the painting of a face painted on an urn
filled with shade, or that color dying in
an abandoned goblet filled with wine:
Shame Fear Guilt Hurt
On the other side of childhood are the seasons.
And the two of us begin to talk,
like sleep and rain, angry and crying
more for ourselves than anyone. Child, the night
inside is vagrant. I see you
counseled by a skull like a dark-hearted Hamlet alone
laughing with tears in his eyes.
“I don’t want to have to. I want to.”
Sex AIDS Sunlight Anger I look
into your eyes sentencing myself
as if I were coming inside you.