The Year of the Tiger

Year of the Tiger

by Miguel Murphy

This new Chinese New Year we were in a film

Holding hands and daring each other

To close our eyes in the surrounding mayhem 

On one beautiful hell of a dancefloor 

In memory, in black-and-white

Two strangers clutching in a crowd. Like close-ups

By Fellini, the drunk midget and the wounded 

Cripple dancing on a cane,

The pit-roasted pig with its pineapple glaze,

Nothing but the excrement

Of blissful minutes, budsmoke, temporary inebriation

The rooftop clamor at last

Falling off the cliffside of a starry abyss

And braceleted Madonna in 1983 

Still digitally singing, you must be 

My lucky star, cuz you shine on me 

Wherever you are--and I can feel it 

That splendid nothingness of wine and vicodin

Like someone hypnotized by the fireworks

Of being alive inside an accident 

Like this body--

A sickness that feels the same as a cliché.

Let's get out of here, I say, and kiss you

To celebrate the darkening

Damaged miraculous happiness--

To enter the opening coffin-like fact of each other.

For no reason some night happening to me 

Is happening to me. O my lucky fucking 

Star, I want to use

Your sweaty machinery. We are infinite

Tonight! We'll never wake to touch like this again.

  

  

Copyright © 2013 by Miguel Murphy. 

About This Poem

"A friend of mine in Venice throws a Chinese New Year party every year in his glass and concrete modernist home paid for by a chair he designed for IKEA--lots of food, music, eccentrics. It's a party, you feel a bit as if it's the last night on earth, but you're happy. Underneath the riotous din is a kind of serious intensity. You're lucky, this pretty young thing is into you, you've got his eye on your eye, and you're not going to waste it. You feel a prelapsarian courage, the whole world is just some beautiful accident you can't get enough of. Let it all fall down into ruin. I mean, why, just why in the hell aren't you already dead? You care, you don't care, you care." 

--Miguel Murphy

About This Author

Miguel Murphy holds a BA and an MFA from Arizona State University. His poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Washington Square and have been awarded both a Swarthout Award and an Academy of American Poets prize. His first collection, A Book Called Rats , (a stunning collection, full of dark eroticism and haunting images that pull the reader into a world both beautiful and dangerous) won the 2002 Blue Lynx Prize from Washington State University's Lynx House Press and will be published in August 2003. He lives in Venice Beach, California.