Tornado Dodgers
The trailer park resident
waits at a forever detour for a thank you
from a gated compound privilege.
Suburban and urban dwellers
contribute to the joke butt
by retreading in public canned sitcoms.
Flooring an accelerator
on the extraction principals,
a high roller cartoon character
takes, only, too busy to hail a cab
or to let up on the poor.
Government regulatory administrators
tire while sitting in the emergency vehicle
with four flat tires and a bumper dimple.
The red tape that comes with a legislative bill
doesn’t hold long before private sector
moths eat loopholes for trucks.
And pathways to wealth for clerks exhaust:
Promotion to a hedge fund right hand
wears down shoe leather too
but worth the deadening exercise.
“Trash” piles just off the highway
for the eventual blind sacrifice.
Rich Murphy’s poetry has won The Poetry Prize at Press Americana twice Americana (2013) and The Left Behind (2021) and Gival Press Poetry Prize Voyeur (2008). Space Craft by Wipf and Stock also came out 2021. Books Prophet Voice Now, essays by Common Ground Research Network and Practitioner Joy, poetry by Wipf and Stock 2020. He has published seven other collections of poetry.
Fixator Press 