Poems—Bruce McRae

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have been performed and broadcast globally.

Go Along To Get Along

Mostly we believe in nothing,

confusing irony with anarchy,

chance and circumstance leading us by the tail,

sometimes considering a cloud

before minds wander into a meadow,

lost in summer's maze

or stood for hours at winter's window.

Sometimes a moment is caught on a nail

and we halt our nervy frittering.

Sometimes the thin man knocks on a wall

and we are startled into life.

For the briefest moment cognition

rattles its chains in the mind's high castle.

And then the rain comes, and then the darkness.

When only the fuzzing of a bug

demands the whole of our attention.

Last Of The Gods

The last god

doesn't give two damns

about souls or destinies.

He is a she and she is an us

and our sins are too many,

the last god yawning

up a stringent wind,

stretching his glass bones,

brewing a fever from which 

the ill shall never revive.

He stirs his tea

with an immaculate finger

and wears the skin of every animal

that's ever been inside a slaughterhouse.

He sees the wicked

men in their wretched cities

and is bored with it —

the dinner bells, the shoelaces,

the spells on vellum —

and longs to go it alone now,

the last god drawing up blueprints,

swaddled in half-hearted intention,

cleaning his million green teeth,

though nothing good will ever come from this.

Basking in ancient darkness,

reduced by age and circumstance,

he's playing solitaire

with the names of motherless children,

nodding off in a red chair,

staring out his infinite window

and watching the past relieve itself,

repeating the same horrors

and wonders of invention,

each hour to him an aeon long,

each shaky breath another planet

to be swallowed by the gut-red sun.

Wearied by adulation 

and no longer baffled with prayer,

the last god lays down his pen.

If he sleeps he dreams of a stone,

a cosmos-coloured stone

that's now a pebble in a sandal

of one of the little people, con't

of the ones once loved, regardless

of their constant making of nuisances,

the ceaseless beseechings,

the acute and countless sorrows

in our brief flash of having become aware.

In The Making

This poem is sponsored by a large corporation

and black ops department of the government.

Created by a complex algorithm

and recently smuggled across a border,

this poem is of vast political influence.

Available in all formats and broadcast in 5G,

this poem is banned and censored.

The source of many global conspiracies,

this poem was written with the assistance

of privately funded artificial intelligence.

Swathes of rainforests were cleared in its creation.

Entire communities were brutalized for decades,

this poem up for sale to the highest bidder.

Thank you to the donors for their kind donations,

this poem will put a good word in for you

with its many powerful connections and friends.

The author of this poem would like to thank

the huge and faceless international symposiums

that made the writing of his poetry possible.

He feels compelled to express his gratitude,

but, please, just leave us alone.

We'll do whatever you ask of us.

We'll say whatever you need us to say,

just please don't hurt the children.

In The Elsewhere

Her death had secret compartments,

hidden dimensions, undiscovered recesses.

Her death had voles and moles and indices.

There were colours no one had ever mentioned.

Tables of intricate marquetry.

A number of moments resigned to memory.

Some deaths are small and devoid of grace,

not a dog or an angel notices.

But her death, her death was everything.

It sank entire navies and rewrote history.

There were motorcades and mastodons.

A volley of wheels and comical noises.

A stifled breeze. Milk teeth. Flapping curtains

in a cottage on the Mediterranean.

Her death had planets of ice and sand,

with smart-mouthed moons and bright-eyed satellites.

We are bereft and grieve wholeheartedly,

her death the mathematics of distraction.

Black night. Red dawn. Yellow morning.

Her death an afternoon so blue

the sky stood still and the priestess wept

and the cat sprawled out in the midday sun

and the prophet decried his warning.

She died countless deaths, not only the one.

Before she was born there was her death,

its lively gospel, its spiritous draft.

Like a hot knife or a summer squall.

Like a green rowboat on the Serpentine.

Her death withheld a redwing blackbird,

a bloodstained apron, some silly bric-a-brac,

a hairpin turn, a book of ancient poetry.

Hard engines. Junk shrines. Temples to the air.

A wayward molecule. The Cat's Eye Nebula.

We stood in water up to our chins.

We burnt our money in a bonfire.

We shrugged off all our skins

and still her death was an accomplishment.

A five year plan. A pout. A pendulum.

Now a queue has formed, a celebration planned.

The other dead have gathered and are linking arms.

The unborn have arrived in their starry vehicles, con't

your death reduced to stones and bones.

We can't walk or talk or be with you.

We are alone and can never go home.

All the fires of the sun shall never warm you.