Caleb Perry Murdock

The First One 
     Inspired by Joni Mitchell’s song “Two Grey Rooms”


The one that I let get away,
thirty years ago, was my first love.
They say the first is the deepest.
I didn’t exactly “let” him go,
more like I pushed him off me.
You see, I had these ideas of what
a love should be, and there was no one
who could meet them.  So I wandered
through decades of idolatry,
shopping for perfection I couldn’t find,
taking this morsel off the shelf,
then that, replacing them, and
wondering why I was always starved.
It was the new taste I was after.
As the years passed, the novelty died
and the handsome faces bled into one.
Today I think of that first love.
I tell myself I cared as much as I could,
as much as youth and ambition allowed,
though had I been a little wiser,
might have been more willing to take
the so-so with the oh so good.

Caleb Perry Murdock was born in 1950 and lives in Rhode Island. He spent most of his life as a word-processing operator for law firms. He has written poetry since his twenties, but he didn’t lose his chronic writer’s block until his late sixties. He is now writing up a storm to make up for lost time.