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Overview
New poems from one of Canada’s best-known poets
Where most poetry seeks contemplative quiet, as in Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility,” Diversion asks: What happens to poetry if one stops trying to block the incoming cacophony and instead embraces the multiple streams of data that bombard the contemporary thought process? What poetry comes from the multitude of channels — ambient office radio, TVs at the gym, rampant social media alerts, eavesdropped conversations within crowds, 24-hour-news cycles, texts, telephone and voicemail, email pings — that constantly interrupt the brain from cogent thought? The result is alternately dark and hilarious, straddling the line between aphorism and poetry and creating an atmospheric narrative through connections that form between seemingly unassociated lines. For better or worse, what used to be stream-of-consciousness is now stream-of-collective-unconsciousness.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770412484 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2015 |
| Pages: | 120 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
About the Author
George Murray is the author of five acclaimed books of poetry, one bestselling book of aphorisms, and two books for children. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Read an Excerpt
Diversion
Poems
By George Murray
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2015 George MurrayAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-770-6
CHAPTER 1
#CivilDisconvenience
What if Revelations had been called Revolutions?
Hang on a second while I google this.
Jesus laughed.
Fire breaks through the smoke the way sun breaks
through the fog.
Quiet as an option silently dies.
Unforgettable facts wedge themselves like stains between
our bedsheets.
Prayer's tinny voice squawks from an analog phone.
Most rioters eventually get distracted by mirrors.
I'd take the calm before the storm if it meant having any calm
whatsofuckingever.
There are levels of speechless we haven't yet discovered.
Wanking is the other white meat of art.
The forecast follows the fearcast.
Horror becomes the state one occupies when seeing oneself quoted
in the news.
Marginalia declared autonomy and formed a state.
People in the suburbs suffer from Stock Home Syndrome.
Who dares enjoy themselves anymore?
Remember to thank Christ you don't have to get off your
couch.
Saying things gets only saying done.
Flames paint outer walls red the way televisions paint inner walls
blue.
Down-the-way is where news happens.
Pluck the bricks flying by to rebuild your house.
Listen for the constant exposition of a man sure he's
nailing a date.
We have the right to demand boredom.
Lassie keeps barking about how much Timmy likes it down the
well.
Sadness retains its title as anger's most widespread
illusion.
It's become apparent your fantasies just aren't interesting
enough.
Civil unrest always evolves into parties.
Police hunch over coffee with their heads bowed and gun hands
twitching.
Rows of driveways straight as bars on windows.
A Streetcar Named Covet.
I just realized my dick and head both loll the same way
when tired.
Dollarama looted but the bookstore left untouched.
Staff the barricades!
We used to say don't go into the woods whereas now we say don't
read the comments.
Cave wall shadows only work if there's a fire.
It appears that decimate now means to reduce by a factor of holy
fuck.
Can anyone tell whether it's kindness or malice that's reached
homeopathic levels?
Allow me to apologize in advance for my humanity.
Type that line as though something depended on it.
Your door rattles in the jamb but the lock is sturdy and continues
to hold.
The armchair uprising has begun.
#ClockworkOrRage
Come all you haters and see what I have wrought.
Our primary role as teachers is to demonstrate how to best waste
time.
I survived Seamus Heaney and all I got was this lousy
career.
Monuments are built daily to distraction.
The terms rescuers and salvagers are mostly interchangeable.
Before the sun has risen it is just a bright hill.
Only 24 men have walked on the moon and/or behind
Jesus.
Crack the spine of The Gutenberg Bubble.
Statistically speaking there has to be a secret door around here
somewhere.
Moses flicked his cigarette into the dead bush.
Plan your strategic withdrawal from wishing everyone a happy
fucking birthday.
You have 73 important updates waiting.
A more likely zombie apocalypse would be a horde of abandoned
buildings.
What we call the sociopaths among us is neighbours.
The number of Aboriginal women missing from this line is difficult
to estimate.
Heaven don't want him and Hell's afraid he'll go
Columbine.
Poets are the unacknowledged escalators of the world.
We all see dead people now.
The subtitles have been subtly lying to us for years.
Sleeper cells awaken and begin plotting in your
spreadsheets.
Ennui is an alert that pops up to tell you there are currently no
alerts.
The Illuminati left their lights on again.
Bombs strapped to our babies in their dear little TNT onesies.
A Room of One's Pwn.
If I had it to do all over again it would be a cookbook.
Simply breathing is moving forward.
Every breast exposed in the Sistine Chapel is a new big bang.
xx is right next to cc.
The emperor of YKK pulls himself together.
Look into the dead shark eyes of our leader.
You are what you contract.
Violence has an exchange rate against the price of oil.
I heard about him but I never dreamed he'd have blue eyes and blue
jeans.
Truly elegant equations deserve cartouches.
Naked old men in flip-flops roam the change room with their
hanging tits and balls.
Religion is like sucking in your gut while standing on the
scale.
Glitter arcs from the TV remote.
There's been a sudden spike in the number of lives ended on knees
in front of a SWAT unit.
I want to die with my boots on or at least my slippers.
Hitler's ghost slow claps in the silence men call Hell.
#DaydreamBereaver
You won't believe what happens next.
All money eventually finds its way to buying airtime.
Blisters on the roof of your mouth from either fried eggs or
something you said.
The sliding scale of fuckable has no handrail.
Best not look at the parts per million.
December asteroid with a bull's eye almost hit by a passing
planet.
Is it too much to ask you to act like porn said you would?
Bettie Page looks like a drawing of Bettie Page.
12,000,000,000 solar mass black hole sucks a golf ball through a
garden hose.
Some proofs lead to surprising hypotheses.
It's increasingly difficult to find an uncrumbled wall to deface.
All the aneurysms you haven't had are gathered at their drawing
board.
Every institution a movie set for a super-villain hideout.
The 12-year-old boys drift in the blue-smoke wind.
Brigitte Bardot is a poem I'd like to fuck.
Snowplows moonlight at mass graves.
A child raised in the refugee camp can't sleep in a house where the
roof doesn't flap.
I wanted to tell you something neither of us knew.
Space is a gauge in the ear of God.
Now that Everybody-Gets-a-Trophy Day is over we can get down
to business.
The world is too full of almost-good folks.
Beat your way past the flailing critical fists with your face.
Like a folder full of how-to videos saved for after the
world's end.
#12 really blew my mind.
If George Lazenby's mole can survive being on George Lazenby
then you can too.
Shiny happy people stabbing backs.
What stale hell is this?
Lowercase letters wake for their midnight feeding.
I only need one more online IQ test to fuck Stephen Hawking over
for good.
Each city fumes like a bong's smoke chamber.
The matter/antimatter problem was the original mutually assured
destruction.
Homecoming queen becomes homestaying queen.
Disciples follow the guide with the umbrella and
megaphone.
One flew over the cuckoo's nest but the rest of us landed
in it.
Death switched to a pistol after complaints a scythe wasn't
individual-enough attention.
I like big buts and I cannot lie.
Freedom is the space found after the last channel on the dial.
The sound of our culture is the sound of a fat ass flopping onto a
toilet seat.
12 reasons you need to try this before you die! are 11 more than
needed to convince me.
What you're reading is a black box.
Bet you a dozen beers the first intelligent thought was a wish.
#UseYourEmojination
A house multiplied also cannot stand.
Disrobe consecutive olive pits with your tongue.
I'll even snip the plastic beer can rings if it means a break from
hating myself.
Frankenstein's masterpiece missed his appointment to have his
stitches removed.
Human is the state being occupies before learning to
choose.
Busybodies wear looks on their faces to turn milk.
Cameraman straddles his cobra dolly and rises to get the
right shot.
Think of all the mathematics inside the eraser.
MC1R is all up in my evolutionary grill.
You think I just fell off the back of a truck when really what I fell
off was the wagon.
Dawn breaks like a mouth full of teeth.
Worry is the product of trying to fit infinite love into
finite time.
Apocryphal selfies roam the borders of the profile's
canon.
Remember to rhyme mom with atom bomb.
So much depended on that red wheelbarrow because it was used to
transport the bodies.
This is where the blubber meets the road.
What if what was sewn together was ideas?
Anxiety is less like a ball in your stomach and more like a cube in
your heart.
My two favourite words are message and deleted.
Bar chart of your stats forms the cliff from which you fling
yourself.
The opposition still rushes you even though they say it's a level
playing field.
Indifference is like water to me.
What we really needed was an army of Doris Lessings.
The blue plate special is the Smurf 'n' Turf.
Become the monster that aggregates all the channels.
Every book shaves a hair from my life like every prayer steals a
piece of the preacher.
Wreckage-sifting is all the rage.
The fossil record will remember my milk carton before it
remembers me.
Every time I sit still I increase my speed.
Poison is such a personal thing for both the one dying and the one
making dinner.
You said exercising and I heard exorcising.
If you search far and wide enough you'll eventually find the bolts in
the internet's neck.
This beheading brought to you by the letter chop and the number
sword.
Enemies leave their laundry in your vestibule.
Lenses widen to get the whole moment but only spread to their
point of view.
An incognito drunk scrambles to remain so.
Tesla coil tested with the sweat on the back of your balls.
Cities are retaken one at a time in the ways steps are by a
stoner.
Maybe this is a good place to put a prayer.
Undead is just a word we invented to give more levels to the idea of
alive.
Narcissistic men will interrupt anybo—
#EasterEggStacy
There must be a billion funerals a day in Mario Land.
52-hertz whale picks up an old KGB numbers station in its
teeth.
Celebrity is a commander at attention before an audience
of soldiers at ease.
Were Madonna's arms always so veiny when miming something
racy?
Porn is becoming its own countryside.
You see yourself as a perfect snowflake but you're part of a
blizzard.
Look around the cave and count those who could murder.
Zombies the world over suffer from a Jesus-based inferiority
complex.
Please wipe down the joystick after use.
Being makes the darkness light and the light start to throw
shadows.
That storm front arrives like a boss.
Are you also being held hostage at any given moment by
the number of men you have left?
Both God's and Nietzsche's emails are fatally
undeliverable.
Stephen King has possessed the body of a ferocious
Stephen King.
Every action is another quest for bliss.
Vote for this book in whatever contest is currently on
your screen.
Schrödinger's cat is in its Xbox.
I'm getting firearms certified to defend my piece of the
End Times.
Age makes the parts that should bend stiffen and the parts that
should be stiff bend.
Guess the number of tsunamis in the jar and win!
Follow the teachings of the Lord on Twitter.
What do you call a town that even the ghosts have left?
Signatures are now alms.
It's easy to suspect everything worthwhile is fake.
Self-imposed diet restrictions are the new righteous piety.
CDC warns of a possibly unchecked spread of meanness through
the population.
The water Jesus walked on wasn't even choked with
plastic islands.
Ecstasy remains as mutable as it is momentary.
I can't wait to fill out the universe's customer satisfaction
survey.
Sad soldiers are totally in these days.
Apocalypse makes the planet's hot parts freeze over and frozen
parts carve ice hotels.
It takes 10,000 fans or one good murder to constitute
fame.
Lying awake is the burden of intelligence.
Even the jay on the windowsill wants in.
Pac-Man and Master Chief fold around nothing as their death
sounds wind down.
In the ocean's darkness there is a grinding.
The insides of some men are the colour of a switched-off
screen.
Iron gates wrought to keep the riffraff out of our
humanity.
Anger fades into itself like Kevin Bacon's jawline recedes into his
neck.
Rocks roll back to reveal the world's empty caves.
All these cameras and yet still the children go missing.
#MarginalPersonalityOrder
Starlings vomit song and call it nature.
Hollywood is rebooting its World History franchise to interest
new audiences.
Lanced thought bubbles suppurate white space.
Starving children would eat Ebola if it came in noodle
form.
Pockets as choked with clacking billiard balls as a porn star's
mouth.
The traffic lights glow like new scabs.
Starlets keep longer in the oven than freezer.
That's as fucked up and perfect as Freddie Mercury's
overbite.
Magnetic poles speak magnetic Polish.
Hug that galaxy with open arms.
Chubby legs on a baby are the world's last honest pleasure.
That man with the plastic glasses never stops humming "Sonny's
Dream."
Death is forever in the process of dying but never dies.
Politicians endorse the stupid fucking children.
Drunks stagger by in perfect stockings.
Always meet your mother in a public place far from home.
Clouds press down like a hand over your mouth.
Police are parked outside the neighbour's house but not doing
anything.
Every stone is a fossil of something.
Those who don't listen closely are best shunned like a colony of
leopards.
Blue chalk dust hangs like a breath before something long
unsaid.
Hurricanes swirl in the satellite photo like nature's bleached
assholes.
It's hard to choose between the best popes.
Hungry people are more dangerous than starving people.
Spread flesh on the sheets like almond butter on bread.
Hunting for porn is now a kind of porn.
The next trick is getting all this AstroTurf to
photosynthesize.
Accidental nakedness found in a gust of wind.
Time is a trellis on space's wall.
Professors keep fucking their students and teaching them
lessons.
Narcissism is the DSM's Occam's razor.
Every word out of a royal's mouth shoots like spermless semen on
the world's face.
Boys fear women who refuse to fear men.
Practice first guessing first and second second.
The baby is almost as big as his Rambo knife now.
Sharpie on the stall door has lost its prophetic cred.
Don't pot the black ball just yet.
Announcements over the prison PA ping off suburban
homes.
Neither smoking nor assfucking without a preparatory enema are
acceptable anymore.
Rifle envy is slightly less creepy than handgun envy.
Diagnose this motherfucker.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Diversion by George Murray. Copyright © 2015 George Murray. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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