Poetry

For my Homeboy, Charles Simic, and John Berryman, reading the Odyssey

by Dan Murphy

July 18, 2026

Odyseus In The Cave Of Polyphemus, Jacob Jordaens, 1635

Dan Murphy

Dan Murphy has published two chapbooks, The Seasick Serenade, Sung…

There are plenty of titles
for your autobiography
its C-V-C ideology
and propensity to gather
a dusty shroud

as if an audience meant
applause

It’s been a long day
a long life
I’m gonna have a drink
or hot coffee
(for the ride home)
I’m fixing a hole
to lie down in
(like Odysseus

making a spell
digging a trench
to fill with blood and honey
to get the dead
to sip and speak)

((You know his mother
took a turn at the trench…
then they did an air hug
like it was Covid comedy
night in Ithaca))

So I’ve fixed earbuds
for the southern journey
of boredom
back to the witch’s home

I’m kissing my fingertips
to get a spark when I pray
It may rain but
I don’t need cover
I need a crowd
or crew of witnesses,

a hearty crew to paddle
the ass out of those salty slashing waves

But I admit
I do need a soul
I can throw on like overcoat
And I need Mother’s eye
to fix the flaw
the world made in my sleeve

She made me
inside and out
Taught me to speak
how to act
She made the world
like Leibniz
grinding that lens
to turn sight itself
inside out
and flabbergasted

I come back
with the tide
again and again like driftwood
bloating and drying
in silent spasm
under the same brutal sun
on deserted beach
no hipsters yet have found

Tags

poetry

Dan Murphy

Dan Murphy has published two chapbooks, The Seasick Serenade, Sung Partial (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and The Book of False Rhyme (Finishing Line Press, 2013), with poems published in Field, Beloit Poetry Journal, Image, Spillway, Zyzzyva, Cortland Review, North American Review, and elsewhere, and with recent publications in 2026 in Epiphany and Eclectica Magazine. He won the American Academy of Poets prize in 2005, and was one of the winners of the George Floyd Poetry Prize with Los Angeles Press, in 2020. Murphy completed his BA in English from University of California at Berkeley, and received a MA in English (Creative Writing emphasis) from California State University at Northridge. He worked as a bilingual teacher and served as union representative in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Find him on Instagram @buddhamartinizero