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Hot Tub

Miguel Murphy

A tryst.
That ends
in a nightly dose.

A contradiction,
emptiness
refused by starlight,

the dark
enflamed with error.
Tell me again

what crime you are
so guilty of?
The hot tub,

26 Seconal—
the moon
like ejaculate.

Delicate.
Poor
Barlow,

you felt
so alone;
you were

the only queer.
January 1, 1951.
In the semantics of

your translation
you intend, in Náhuatl
a long while,

to abandon
your cadaver.
There.

Miguel Murphy is the author of Detainee (Barrow Street Press, 2016).

Occasion

Themes

About this Poem

“Robert Barlow, aged 16, was either the 43-year old H. P. Lovecraft’s lover for a summer in 1934, or just his disappointed protégé, who in his own middle years would overdose on Seconal after a student threatened to expose him for being that medical monster of the age, a homosexual. The diagnosis, the name of the disease. In 2019, I sit in my hot tub, but the freedoms of this era feel illusory. A single pill a night makes a frightening plague a kind of historical footnote. Such starlight. The backside of the century.”
—Miguel Murphy

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More by this poet

The Sunlight

You wouldn’t know it could feel so redundant—
the wolfish starlings plunder the grass
and nothing burns. Big Sur. We came here to rest.
The coast, a color. The thought of nothing,
the blue middle of my life—
A cliff side and a footpath
down to the small beach. And fire, there
a cold wind. Long waves the whole year—restless,
leafy and metallic,
the brightness of ash. The sunlight
like something from Tarkovsky, one pointless, small ambition

Miguel Murphy

2016

Year of the Tiger

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

Miguel Murphy

2013

Demon and The Dove

The psychotherapist has a sad dove 
dying in his eye. He looks at the light
like wood holding fire in it
reflected in small caves 
and tells me there is a window where love weeps
over what it cannot know. The dove's

trembling, flickering like a sun alone
in the dark nest of his face, and the psychotherapist 
is saying, there is nothing like losing your Self
for a Demon. We walk in to each other 
as into a museum, and our portraits gleam. This sounds
like he's saying our deaths are old, they
may not even belong to us.

Miguel Murphy

2011

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Hot Tub

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