If There Is a Book
If there is a book on all reputable lists You're the first to find it and declare It is the one to read this book you appropriate As nearly one you wrote yourself
You purpose great books to self aggrandize In disguise you advocate seemingly selflessly For its excellence perhaps in hope That the conclusion drawn by all
Is that the excellence is all yours And your ability to award to those You deem worthy of your attention And your inflated self will compete
For a place on the chart you keep Inventing to pad your reputation Honed to mean you are in fact The one and only anything and everything
Sheila E. Murphy
Murphy’s most recent books are Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books, 2023) October Sequence: Sections 1-51 (mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, 2023), and Sostenuto (Luna Bisonte Prods (2023). Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy's book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland).