Do Not Touch: Wet Poem
By Jim Murdoch
People talk about poetry in motion
and I do get it, I do; it’s a metaphor.
But in my experience
poetry has more to do with stillness.
Like watching paint dry.
The thing about watching paint dry
is it’s like all those foods
your kids insisted they detested and
had never even tasted
yet learn to love in time.
It’s like chanting “Om…”
and forgetting the silence at the end.
Dried, however, isn’t cured.
Cure means preserve… apparently.
Which is what poems 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.