All Right

Already

Bruce McRae

These poems have been

previously published

online and in the journals

and magazines listed here:

Adirondack Review

Astropoetica

BODY

Caught In The Net

Clockwise Cat

Denver Syntax

Em Dash

14

The Inflectionist

FutureCycle Poetry

Hawai’I Pacific Review

The Journal

Life As

Mel Brake Poetry

Miller’s Pond

Obsessions Literary

Magazine

Pacifica Literary Review

Poetry Magazine.com

Point Blank

Rattle

Theodate

Third Wednesday

Thrush

Verdad Verdad

Visions International

The Write Room

Published By Fowlpox Press

©2015 Bruce McRae

ISBN: 978-1-927593-45-5

All Right

Already

Bruce

McRae

All Right Already

This Too Passes

One Morning

The Volume Of Man

The Bee’s Knees

The Spider Says

Death of A Mouse

Death Cannot Be Proved

What Went Down With The Ship

Faraway Suns

Pluto, Or Bust

Stirring Ashes

Methinks I Am Too Savage

Hello America

Bad News for Bunny

Grass in My Hair

The Aroma

Day’s End

A House

The Moon Isn’t

Through Dale and Glen

This Too Passes

A time between time,

late summer evening, soil in decay,

the worm-fattened birds burning in the trees,

and all their songs about flying . . .

A portion of time so realized

it assumes breadth and magnitude,

the two of us caught up in it,

the momentous back currents,

the eddies of the self’s oblivion

and soul’s sweetened annihilation.

The actual second you said something

so profound it was impossible to comprehend.

Or I couldn’t understand because I hadn’t heard.

Or I’d heard, but I did not listen.

One Morning

The morning night ended.

The morning I lay in the bed’s snow

making tight little angels,

clinging to the last starbeam,

considering seriously the nature of light,

of light’s long and thankless journey

through the sovereign dark.

Morningtide, in bed with the blues

and a black cup of coffee,

gnawing a nail to the quick,

chewing on the straw of contemplation.

Thinking about daylight’s simile.

Inventing, in the cold clean light of day,

a metaphor for invention.

The Volume of Man

My body is filled with dovecotes and spoons.

I contain geraniums and warheads.

Sloshing about inside me are clouds and ditches.

There’s peculiar scenery and savage imagery.

Instead of a heart, a Roman catapult.

Instead of lungs, galloping palominos.

There’s a highway inside me that’s going nowhere.

It’s just below the surface, a sub-molecular reality,

and very earthy it is too, very meaty.

And often I walk this road alone,

cutting a forlorn figure, I imagine.

In a single sentence we approach ourselves.

We meet, exchange pleasantries, and are soon parted;

gladly relieved of our beautiful burden.

The Bee’s Knees

It’s only suddenly dawned on me,

how I’m nothing more than sand in a shoe.

That I’m a puppet in a seaside skit.

A minor character in a beach novel.

How I resemble most a reflection

in a carnival’s trick mirror.

And here I thought I was the pig’s wings,

the caterpillar’s kimono, the gnat’s elbows.

Instead of this tongue-tied parrot I’ve become,

the one spouting self-righteous epithets in order

that he might confirm his paltry existence.

And not this monkey on a string.

Not this breeze over the city dump I am.

This creaking wheel. This lousy haircut.

The Spider Says

I’m familiar with apprehension,

aware of doubt, sympathetic to terror.

Consider me a patient knot in a thread,

a little stone calling to the dark of the world,

the multi-eyed beast in her sullen quarter;

she who is tethered to a latch or a hair.

The spider says Sweet fly, sweetmeat,

think me the wraith to your gummy end,

my door invitingly ajar, the table always set.

And these are my babies, my thousands,

so curious, so ravenous, nimble copies

of copies, sentient pebbles fleeing hunger’s edge.

It is they, era-perfect, who scurry.

I set them loose upon the edible earth.

Death of A Mouse

Which is no great thing,

coming in from the frost-bitten fields,

meeting its mousey maker,

eternity’s go-between the simple housecat,

a fat and playful agent of death.

The late mouse, its life poured out

on a mat by a door,

the watch of its heart stopped,

the wheel in its head no longer turning.

As must we all lie down,

a little dirt-nap for the fallen just,

an old wind aching in the yellowing glade,

fields of gold calling us home,

the grains of harvest piled high.

Death Cannot Be Proved

It’s the hour of the wolf in a janitor’s closet.

February is waiting at the end of the hall.

Ghost-mice are performing a danse macabre.

Here, at the institution, everything closes.

We never mention the rooms inside this room,

the dust-defying gravity, the phases of the moon.

We don’t talk about the inevitable silences

or darkness pooling under a door.

We say little or nothing . . .

Established in the year Zed, the institution

is as dull as a morgue or an office meeting.

The air scarcely shifts, the files unmoved.

Our business is zero.

Now it’s 4 a.m., and the roaches hold rule:

tiny tyrants throwing terrible tantrums.

Whom the ancients regarded as very old souls.

Whom the gods embraced in their ruin.

What Went Down With The Ship

Illustration of the Madonna breastfeeding.

A cute little bladder infection. Ectoplasm.

Burnished magnesium. Elongated fatwas.

A book of screams in a little red barn.

Trigonometry for mummies. Hoe-downs.

A knife balanced on a knife-blade.

Walls of ghost-breaths. Mystic sensibilities.

Pillow-books and phatic salutations

Swordplay behind the School of Dance.

The desert of the real. Light’s threshold.

The first and last of polyester newspapers.

An entire set of ant-dreams in polished amber.

The sudden realization of a universal truth.

A kiss on fire. The meaning of cancer.

Shadow-shadows, once cloistered in attics.

A series of teeth crying out for a head.

Miserable buttons. The beasts of Atlantis.

A rebel yell with toothache. Indelible bunnies.

The diaphanous domain of melancholia.

Spare savant-whistles. Pennies that sweat.

Throttled soldiers’ breaths. Bone booties.

Birthmarks, and a comic’s monologue.

Trophies for bowling. Torn spectrographs.

Thirteen bullets and world’s smallest dreary.

The skull-music of handgun logic.

Thermodynamic miracles. Stygian gloom.

Aural karma. A stormy impertinence.

Chaotic streetwear. Vials of oxen-blood.

Trade winds captured in a blue bottle.

A single syllable, in Santa Claus mode.

A recipe for tears. Electromagnetic slippers.

Shot glasses in love with toxic empathy.

Dinosaurian scarf and mittens. Wing-nuts.

Brutish thunderclouds. Seasick serpents.

Essence of Runnymede. Broken cattle.

User-friendly totalitarian regimes. Pixels.

The dim recall of every passing breath.

Some dead skin sloughed from this very hand.

The dark-eyed junco and varied thrush.

A burning shortlist, as if a guttering candle.

Faraway Suns

“And at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like

five hundred million little bells.”

Antoine de Saint Exupery, The Little Prince

More stars than toads or moths or damselflies.

More stars than knots or wedding rings or roses.

From under my pillow I can hear the stars reflect

upon the hideous triumphs of function and form.

They influence my moods and fads in furniture.

The tears of the stars are what water our vegetable gardens.

Black stars. Furnaces of indigo. Of indefinite colour.

Stars that creak in the wind. That create weather.

Fallen stars I collect like acorns or raspberries.

Aloof stars, haughty and remaining at a distance.

Copper stars on silver wires, suspended from the impossible.

Flowers of wordless fragrances gathered at the river’s bend.

Little explosions taking forever to divulge their secrets

to the sleepy child, the fox, the worm, the hare.

A star-quelled night in a curious village.

I’m awake and listening to stories of epic proportions.

Tales of gods and animals, of eternal love and despair.

Saints wailing on a lush sward in Capricorn.

Souls in Aquarius singing an epoch-long mal aria.

Faraway suns, their arms burdened with purple planets.

Bright wells serving the will of the people, the strangest people,

who are very like us, and very much different,

who wish upon stars, studying their bones, and who wonder –

outlandish questions for which no answers exist.

Countless sums beyond number.

Pluto, Or Bust

The edge of the edge of the edge . . .

After Pluto, then what?

More nothing. Ruin engaged

with the absolutes of nothingness.

Dark bodies of the void.

Tumbling ice. Imaginary fragments.

A ballet of rubble.

The first astronaut to Pluto said

what what what.

He saw the star was a sun

and said what.

He scanned Charon, muttering what.

He surveyed the starscape, longing

for home in the primordial whatness.

Pluto, which was, but now isn’t, a planet.

Like the tenth planet. Like Planet X.

Like a rogue planet discovered by accident.

By the Hardy Boys.

By wistful intuition.

Pluto, last stop on the Interstellar Express.

A buggy blot on a lens or mirror.

A snowball thrown by a once-playful god,

a god grown vindictive and angry

among the excesses of pure abandon.

Stirring Ashes

Death fills up on bread before a late supper.

Death mentions himself in the third person.

Death pools his already impressive resources.

His eyes, like moonlight, follow you into bed.

He climbs in through every window.

This is the corner he lays a stone for a vast foundation.

And this is the moment he sizes up a mourning suit,

the part of the night where he likes to keep his hand in,

murder a ghost or two, throttle a puppy.

He checks on his rat-traps, humming an icy tune.

He attends to his flies and massive weapons collection.

Death swims in a cistern and has no time for God.

He toils in a bone orchard, another crop of withered fruit,

answering the occasional invitation to a game of chance,

courting widows, crashing weddings, visiting the children’s ward.

That’s him measuring a cough, weighing a booboo,

examining a battlefield, culturing a few choice wounds.

He’s as insistent as cold. Like the damp,

he gets into everything. Like vermin, he goes

anywhere our furtive breaths invite him.

That’s death in the cooking pot, among virginal hairs,

in the mouth of a surgeon, beneath the nails of a novice nun.

It slithers under the rug. It stains wallpaper.

Switches medicine. Festers stitches. Knocks loudly

on every door in every house in every town.

Death plays the odds, hand in glove with Beelzebub.

Deaths plays doctor and has a wicked sense of humour.

“Have you heard the one about the digitalis and the judge?”

he enquires through a rictus of laughter,

and knowing full well the answer.

Methinks I Am Too Savage

Reading Macbeth is the same as not reading Macbeth.

It’s as if I have two apples and you’ve given me five,

or I’ve been locked overnight in a department store.

Reading Macbeth reminds me of a train station in the drizzle.

It’s the equivalent of a lifelong nervous disorder.

It reminds me of a job I had in ’79 and disliked intensely,

or when our dog ran away and was consequently hit by a car.

I’m reminded of a regrettable past and the ones I’ve loved.

I’m quite tempted to pencil in a plan for tackling the future.

Reading Macbeth has over-stimulated my imagination –

great thoughts but in tiny and unremarkable circumstances.

You’re forced to ask yourself some awfully big questions.

There are long walks by the seaside and letters to be written.

You realize your own tragic history is nothing exceptional

and come to appreciate our planet’s natural beauty.

Once, you laughed so hard you wet yourself, then began to cry.

Once your father raised his hand to you, like Adam to Cain.

It’s suddenly becoming apparent you’ve misused your time.

That lives are for wasting.

Hello America

I see your smoky grey flanks.

I see you blowing on your fingernails.

I see you selling dishwashers.

I’m not joshing you, from here

I can count many more than fifty stars.

I can hear your shot glasses tinkling.

I even envy your body-armour.

Ah come on you big lug,

show us more zany dance steps,

more of your downhome recipes,

your cattle-prods and urban glitter.

And there’s a phone always ringing.

Why don’t you answer it?

Why not a splash of oil on platinum?

How about a silicon driveway?

I can smell buffalo cooking.

I appreciate your woody bacon.

I can feel your money in the dark.

America, lend me a sawbuck.

America, we fit like old sneakers.

I’m the soup to your sandwich,

the gun to your drawer.

You’re my all-night pawnbroker.

My 24/7 candy store.

I like your jazzy slacks

and the way you launch rockets.

I dig your lingo gringo.

You have smooth haunches,

tractors, skyscrapers.

That’s some battleship you have there.

It’s sexy. It’s prim and it’s proper.

And I love what you’ve done to the night.

From here I can see your lights winking,

a right little box of treasures.

Your jets are staining the sky.

It’s like a million toilets flushing,

a million lasers coming on,

a million ads for cereal.

Why hell, you invented Hollywood.

You say things like golly-gosh

then send in the Marines.

Hey mac, hey bub, hey buster.

Let’s be bestest buddies.

Let’s just drive somewhere.

Let’s take a spin for the hang of it.

Let’s re-invest in hitch-hiking.

Or I can watch cartoons

and listen to the blues.

I can drink your coffee, with plenty of sugar.

I enter into your honky-tonks.

I’m choking down your beer.

I go into a roadside inn

where I’m served double portions.

I’ve been hit by a baseball,

or was it a crashing satellite?

Oh, and America, just by the way;

I see you’re electing presidents.

I hear your television,

it’s on all the time.

I hear the rabbi, priest and minister –

you’ve got God on your side,

and on your wampum.

You’ve been to the moon.

You have billionaires and soup kitchens.

You’re investing wildly,

buying low and selling high.

America, you’re reaping the whirlwind.

Bad News for Bunny

The bad news is

you're not one

of

God's little ponies

or an old hit

on the radio.

You'll never be

a clever trick

that they drag out

at parties.

The sun will never

come from you.

I'm sorry that I have

to be the one

to tell you,

but it's a short ride

and it's a fast one.

For those of you

with aspirations —

aspire. But you,

you the one in the back

looking decidedly

sick at heart:

that feeling that you're feeling

is right on the money.

You'll never be one

of Heaven's shiny pennies

now.

Grass in My Hair

I was arguing

with the scarecrow.

His voice

was like a wall

of sand coming

closer and closer.

He had corn

on his breath

but no mouth

to speak of.

His mind

was a straw stalk

in the wind,

all the colours

of a golden

rainbow, there,

but not there,

even his pinstripes

soil-scented.

And I was saying

to the scarecrow,

“We end,

we begin.”

I was telling him

the true names

of all the dead.

I was asking

a stupid question:

“Where’s the crow

inside my head?”

Which he thought

quite funny,

a perpetual grin

on his dried lips,

his eyes seeing

into the far distance,

a tear forming

in the new silence

that summer, and he

impeccably dressed.

The Aroma

Comrades, you ask for Truth

as if ordering dessert

or enquiring about the temperature.

Truth! you cry in unison,

shifting your collective weight

from one extreme to the other.

A few have even torn away

their hair-shirts and sackcloth suits

to showcase their scarring,

the masses consuming their mass

in lies, in untruths and non-truths;

grown round and comfortable.

Rabble, why do you persist

with your pursuit of disappointment?

The truth about Truth,

and I’ve come a long way to tell you this,

is not for the light-hearted,

and I would insist you return

to your homes and your pies.

The oven doors are opening . . .

Sweet cherry pie!

Day’s End

Sundown, which is a book closing,

which is the last page turned

in a story unwillingly relinquished,

starlings crowding cloudbanks to the east,

the west glowering, so proud of itself

and the great works the Earth has accomplished.

When one moment catches sight of another,

short-winded from breathless passages,

the mind idly strolling about, wandering

toward the swirling mists we term ‘pre-history’,

seeing there the old made new,

long before the slang of our time

and its ream of ambiguities, written in blood

and on stone, their messages sealed always.

A House

A house shaped like a tree.

A house in the form of a stone.

A ship that’s a house.

The river-house.

House on the moon, the dark side,

its porch light on always,

attracting moths and meteors:

something to hope for

when seen from a long distance.

*

My house sings beside a ditch.

My house struggles with its conscience.

My house falls up a hill.

It’s where I live;

I go home because I’m not there.

Because I am.

Because I have to be somewhere

Because I have to be.

*

The house in my head

has eyes and legs and lips and a heart.

The mind-house is one room

inside numberless rooms;

a wooden dreamscape,

a child’s nightmare of bricks flying

and doors that won’t open.

There’s something unsayable

under the floorboards.

*

The portable house –

you can take in anywhere

and everywhere.

You can never leave or arrive.

It follows you to school, to work.

It’s hands-free.

It’s no bigger than your mouth.

Just deflate and fold

and you’re on your way.

*

In one house I lived in

the cat was king and dog a citizen.

In one house the ghosts

took turns frightening themselves.

In another house

the furnace stayed on no matter

what we did or didn’t do.

And the mice were very intelligent –

saints to the roaches’ sinners.

*

The house is on fire, then underwater,

then invisible, then in outer space.

The house is black, then red, then purple.

The house is edgy, divine, sanguine, undone.

It has hair and teeth and principles.

A circle, it thinks it’s a square.

It’s lost its bearings.

Someone suggests: Let’s go there!

But we can’t go there.

*

The house of sod.

The house Bosch built –

doors only on the inside,

the floors up a wall,

its furnishings in people-form.

Set in its ways,

it’s the planet which is shifting.

*

Come in, you’re out.

This is the room God sent you.

Here is where we store the clouds.

That’s the closet that death was born in.

This is the hall we can’t get to.

The light enters here

then gets lost along the way.

The air decides for itself –

because we’re all free-thinkers here.

We all live somewhere else.

*

The house is abandoned now.

It seems to be (but it isn’t)

always late autumn – inside and out.

The penultimate leaf waves farewell.

A torn curtain shudders

in a last-gasp effort.

The dust is barely disturbed

by the ghost-whisperers –

that handful of lonely spectres

who refuse any notice of eviction.

Like little flames, one by one

by one, they flicker out.

They can’t come to the door right now.

Try again, in the next world.

Knock louder.

The Moon Isn’t

I’m not sure what the moon is,

but I know what it isn’t.

The moon isn’t an empty Cineplex

or shopping-cart thrown in a canal.

It isn’t a letter on a sweater.

The moon’s not a recipe for road kill,

though it’s seen a lot of death in its time,

a great surplus of killing and war.

The moon isn’t a kind-hearted stranger

or paramour carving your initials into tree bark.

It’s not a barber or a cucumber.

Oh, it may be one celestial body

orbiting another every 28 days,

but it isn’t a slice of blueberry pie

or a sick note from your doctor.

It’s not an excuse for doing badly,

antique pincushion, inner workings of zed.

The moon is not an infant

born with a hole in her aorta.

It’s not a blob of glue left over

from your nephew’s science project.

The moon’s nobody’s fool or prison-bitch.

It may be a number of things

to a number of people;

but the moon’s no patsy.

It’s not prepared to sign that slip of paper.

It’s not going to come along quietly.

No, it isn’t ready, ready or not.

I’m not quite sure about what the moon is,

but it isn’t funny.

Through Dale And Glen

The journey starts in a cupboard,

in a plug behind the TV set,

from a shoebox of family photos.

You can tell you’re traveling

by the wind feeling at your neck,

by the dust on Christ’s sandals,

by the dying birches scratching the moon.

The moon’s eye follows you across night’s room.

You’re the Eternal Hitch-hiker,

the road a river of bitumen,

a parallelogram, a notch on a rifle.

The road is your imagination,

a howl stirred by cocktails and yage.

It’s not a road, it’s a line drawn in the sand

or path of personal misgivings.

What matters is how the journey begins.

Marching to Thermopylae.

Swimming the Euphrates.

Kicked like a can.

Because getting there is half your problem –

wormhole, dune buggy, dirigible . . .

In a contemplative mood

you’re rehearsing endless departure,

envisioning the journey’s end,

its pretzels and beer and unexceptional Saturdays.

You’re older now,

and more tired than thought justifiable.

Evening is your constant companion.

Patting the dog’s head,

your eyelids flutter then wow.

When you sleep it’s a terrible slumber.

Flag

It's nights like this I ask myself,

what is a flag? A fluttering

symbol of a nation's amplified

psychosis. A blood-drenched rag

dipped at the passing catafalque.

A handkerchief to wave at the

soldiers marching off to war,

marching against human failure.

Run it up the pole and see who

salutes it. Use it for swaddling,

a bandage after an accident, to

mop the feverish brow of one

unwell. A thing to dry your hands

on after throwing in the towel.

Pushcart-nominee Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician with over 900

publications, including Poetry.com and The North American Review. His

first book, ‘The So-Called Sonnets’ is available from the Silenced Press

website or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit

‘BruceMcRaePoetry’ on Youtube.