​I collaborated with Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and the Environment as an expert peer reviewer to review and evaluate an article for publication in Vol. 10 No. 1.

"Smarty Pants" is from my manuscript "Epilogue: The Left Behind. It was first published in E.ratio Magazine. Click above to hear a reading of it. Thank you.

​From Aqueous Humour to Smoothie
 
 
Retinal reality giggles before integration
with personal background, attitude, and mood.
Sometimes the movie is paid for but missed
and paid for again, never seen.
Other times the whole Cranium
Multimedia Center has its way
with a glossy moment so that a grainy film
blots or mops into a memory.
Good luck to the next visual 
and optical axis crossing! Warning,
flailing limbs or jumping trunk.
 
Floating on nerve endings
between the out there novation
and the interior that continues to adjust
ergonomics, the organism lives
in a novel during the writing.
A lifespan stretches so that a hologram
slumps stumped behind the user illusion
controls while looking to edit tomorrow.
 
For a continent, the collective lens reports
on momentum mounds on both sides
to suggest that around the blend
the fruits from ignorance again fall.
 

​lifeandlegends.com/rich-murphy/

​https://terrorhousemag.com/terror-maintenance/

​When outside Plato’s Cave capitalism’s crisis horizon threatens with precarious “every conduct is economic conduct,” “I once was mine; now I am theirs,” and “homo Deus” (a new species of humans from the loins of the wealthy only), prophetic voices are needed in an effort to counter and perhaps change the narrative’s and the future’s direction. This collection of poems attempts to do just that. It is an alternative voice offering a way forward that promotes the ideas of Hegel and Nietzsche through Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life and Slavoj Zizek’s Less than Nothing. My current project entitled “Practitioner Joy” is also my confrontation with my practice as a poet and, at least in part, my inevitable death.
 
There is absolutely nothing to lose in my projects. Poets know well that we will die. Yes, yes this manuscript is poetry, but its sibling, philosophy, lurks within it. These poems break further from poetic styles from my past in that they are more stylistically confident in their conviction to name and in their embrace of a way forward not only for a person but for humans without corporate capitalism and without Homo Deus threats. While the poems are different from what lyric poems are being published in journals today, I ask that you consider the submission seriously. I believe they are the future. (I believe in my new –to me— poetics and believe that my manuscript is what Blake called “firm persuasion.”) While the manuscript has grown to 79 pages and will grow no more, when it was 64, it won as a semi-finalist in the 2019 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition.
 

Prophetic Voice Now
 
By the financial crash of 2008 neo-liberalism had become known as the scam it always was, and capitalism, in crisis, now needed and needs neo-fascist politics as crutches with surveillance under one arm and militarized police under the other. The news reminds us daily of Brexit, Trump (and those like him), and the inequality that is bound to lead to violence. Prophetic Voice Now argues why the prophetic voice by screen, fiction, and poetry writers is vitally important now while we are outside Plato’s Cave, experiencing what Zizek calls the "edifice of the logical interconnection of all possible illusion:" We get to try again, to "fail better," perhaps with dialectics in mind.
 
Given that our global and national cultures are interregnum at this time and that we are at the threshold of such phenomena as the-internet-of-all-things and transhumans (or what Harari calls Homo Deus), the paper explains why giving voice to alternative myths (or ideologies) may help redirect the current direction. The paper offers an example, urging changing one’s life through practice to become a member of Zizek’s “fragile absolute” in the struggle to reclaim the commons as space craft (Ecology, biology, intellectual property, etc.), referring to a place where humans value their being, their becoming, lives as Nietzsche’s acrobats. The paper refers to Harari, Zuboff, Brown, Zizek, Sloterdijk, Heidegger, and perhaps others in its argument and has time for virtual question and answer exchange.