Sheila E Murphy

Five Rehearsals


~ 1 ~

Surrender practices itself in static confluence with slow force of the unnoticed

Chance reconnoiters with in-depth
Numeric quotient past the sieve
Of least insistence,
Does anyone watching fail to note
A venerable ideology impositing
Some blue fault, some mediology
A nascent spearhead of a righteous
Cost-per-faring badly

In the end zone of endearance,
She hums to sleep my psyche given
Over to the river where a somnia
Confused with peace replies
To speech merely imagined
Tagged reflexively as thought


~ 2 ~

Cirrus cloud glaucomes the lines grown imprecise to mean another thing

Shoeful steps resort to documented overdose
Undone in tandem with impressionable
Freshness tarned
Apart from being anymore inspected,
When a spool has been undone
And there are loose motions allowed
To laxen linkages between
One point and another

Centers smolder out of line-
Posts, as missing cement drones
Quietly the crops receive
The water, touch the air, accept
A life above the small, the risen
Chalice, bread, as life out of
A blur so generous


~ 3 ~

Stones equal only to the stones that skip across the pond

An opening across defines the thing within,
Along the seams are generosities
Pressed into the next plane, even
Filamental brevity accustomed to
More genuine blue river,
Fallen across the sand beside
The stones

A place to sit among the changed
And situated points along the tangible
Fine map without a fold,
Perceived equal to tones
Sometimes invisible circumstances
Live above the people from the state,
The line of viewers grows
Continually longer and more curious


~ 4 ~

Softest sweatshirt graybeige hangs clean from her thin frame all perfumed and easily repeatable

A pretty nice touch, only ___ years old
First pick of the draft, infinite minutes left to go,
Beautiful to be approached regard-
Less of sunlight or cloud-
Cover, territorial, a cloth of everlast
To frame with hands the usual unusual

Reclaimed song sputtering or all the quiet
In a laugh, a room of light,
A sure sestina, and a calm drift
Drawn freehand in a single motive
Pressed by nerve and say-so
Paused by the polite soon
Referendum of the psyche's sweetness


~ 5 ~

Control imposes the direction west before the south begins to sting

Apparent firecrack jolts open or shut
Sweet stasis just as earth stakes out
Its sitcom threnody imparted by
The loyal thrift, accustomed as one
Is to cloistering the swift ease
Motioning to marrow when the if zone
Scurries patchwork close to depth,
How might one address impartial monotone

A count is off
The bluster scolded in an offhand way
Infuses "you are?" "you did?"
"Can you?"
The ephemeral reduced
To solid matter taxes
Where one settles in the mind at night