BY JIM MURDOCH
Copyright is held by the author.
Somewhere along the line
we realized we were lost.
Admitted, I mean.
I really mean accepted.
And then I wondered when,
and how exactly, did we get lost —
or become — and why didn’t we notice?
Because everything was so familiar:
the house, the job, the buses and cars,
the ads on TV, the meals in the fridge,
the sun in the sky and the dust on the . . .
well, the dust just about everywhere.
People say you can feel lonely
in a roomful of people
so, I guess feeling lost in
your own front room’s not that weird.
You don’t have to be lost to feel loss.
Losing, having lost, having been lost,
having become lost.
It all blurs.
Loss is not absence. Well, it can be.
Mostly it’s defeat.
***
Jim Murdoch is a prolific Scottish poet. In 2025 alone, he published 140 poems and wrote a further 200 to replace them. Over the last 50 years pieces have been accepted by respected journals such as Acumen, Stand, and — much to his own surprise — Analog, though the greater amount by far have vanished without trace. For 10 years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives quietly in Glasgow with his wife and, whenever the mood takes him, next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection, and four novels — Jim, not the cat.