Five poems by Rich Murphy Self-Improvement:  A Preface   With comfort, a leaping antelope in the city, the construction crews begin work on the senses.   The first circles of both the ears, hemorrhaging with cabbies, feel the tapping of cement trucks and become the synchronized orchestra pits with cottoned batten roofs.   The pupils of civilization, in horror, strapped beneath the film of grit, witness the wrecking of green and the boom of rose petal lids.   With the upper lip advertising the noxious wormwood of street crossings and meals, the park department distributes lollipop air fresheners before the banks are opened each day.   Because flesh blisters from swivel chairs and leather soles, the sharper citizen pokes and discovers the massage parlor cast with no need for beckoning and call. The Survival of the Fitter In the hands of the inventor, the new tool balances weather's spinning beach ball and renders improved devices of amateur jugglers jury-rigged broomsticks.   The instrument with myriad attachments useless in the queue of pedestrian needs overgrew the arms of manipulators.   As the engineers gather to witness and confirm the simple control from the planted feet of the innovator, adjustments and enhancements are added to the magic.   After the drunk driver on a crowded street corner has owned the unassembled contrivance a child's lifetime, the improviser goes to work testing, implementing the dream of a summer day near the ocean. The Misnomer The victim buries the dead enemy with a bulldozer and spit, while waiting for his stretcher ride through his prisoners, to a bandage, and the Deed to Earth.   Comprehended somehow beneath the ignorance, the bank of fog retreats once again to the newspaper's cool silo.   Announcing the virginal declarations archaic, the strumpet blaring "Gad Zeus" and "holy host", the scientist stretches the sheets and puffs a pillow on a tradition:   The citizen frolicking into sleep is waked.   The neglected child of castles cocks a smoking revolver over the bowed heads of worshippers, while collecting the inheritance, but the historian born on the bayou and raised in a cloud continues to perceive love's anthem. The Courtship Spreading the asphalt picnic blanket, the pubescent lad smooths out its wrinkles and uses heart-shaped suburbs to hold the corners from the wind.   Burdened with the basket, the lass rests nature's conduit in the center of love's unconsciousness and arranges the conversation into streets and parking lots and plazas.   Sprawling among the plates and utensils, the two workers feed each other and play until sandwiched between two black sheets and then catch a bus for the city limits.   When love is a steel erection under glass, the evening does not reveal the heaves and pots and blades of grass, yet the ants parade about the cemetery and swarm the broad loom carpet. The perfect places are interrupted by the clumsy feet of a poem sweet poem. From Valley to Valet Rolling out their hot top nature onto the rainbow's forest, the doormen carpet the earth with ribbons of black destinations.   With nowhere exotic to go on rubber and oil the dignitaries parade up and down parking lots as remembered roses, flamingos on marshlands and in the evening float through each street's tube of fluorescent light, shadows.   Between the sun and the flat device that sucks its heat where no fauna props a fawn suspended by gold threads, the master and servant, sharing the same flesh stand in wind waiting to have their dreams thrashed from their hulls between the hard and difficult darknesses.   Creating the way to the materialized human from the naked hunger among weeds and beasts, the restless workers open doors of extinction, deaths whose rotting will matter only– the eight ball side of a visionary's putting green.

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