A One-Trick Pony does the Moonwalk
Over the past sixty years I have loved,
in my own way and as best I could,
an assortment of girls followed by
a similar assortment of women.
As a boy I tended to love girls and
as a man I tended to love women.
While a man-boy there may have
been some overlap as woman-girls,
strangely enough, never caught on.
Naturally enough I assumed the love
I felt for girls would be the same love
I would later feel for women and then,
in time, old and even older women.
My problem was I only knew one way
to love and not everyone cares to be
loved that way. I used to imagine I was
bad at loving but the truth is love is
my moonwalk and, as party tricks go,
well, it gets old quick.
©2024 Jim Murdoch All rights reserved.
Jim Murdoch grew up in the heart of Burns Country in Scotland. In fact, his first poem was in butchered Scots. Poetry, for him, was about irrelevances—daffodils, vagabonds and babbling brooks—until one day in secondary school the teacher read Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’ and he felt as if the proverbial scales had fallen from my eyes. How could something so… so unpoetic as far as he could tell be poetry? He’s been trying to answer that question for the past fifty years.