GAS Featured Poet: 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. His books are The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press); An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy; (Cawing Crow Press) and Like As If (Pski’s Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).

 A Little Chat With Ourself


I’m talking to you through a rip in the seaside,
out of a warmed dent in the passing nothingness,
from behind a loop of tightly woven angel-hair.

I’m talking to you, and the wind is rubbing a cornfield.
I’m telling you the sun is sawing its right hand.
That the moon is a knothole in God’s coffin,
the stars His marred and excitable match-heads.

I’m going along, caught between a feather and a flower.
I’m shouting from the top of my voice,
from the foot of the stairs.
I’m talking to you from a squeak at the circus.
Pointing out opossum’s breath.
Explaining, carefully, gunpowder.

I’m telling you the world is a fog of consciousness.
I’m telling you about the mountain chain
that’s fallen in love with a river.
About a river pouring itself into your tea.
About a cup of tea embarrassed by the cosmos’s antics.

You’re listening to me spouting forth
from the swirling vortex in mommy’s sewing machine.
You’ve been asleep under a stone for a thousand years.
You’re hearing my voice, but believe it’s the rain falling,
and that each cold drop is a planet or miniature Himalayas.

I’m talking to you from the ragged hum of my hands.
I want you to realize that I’m snow
drifting in a far-off land.
I want you to see how the world still loves you.
To know the stars understand.





Chickadee Thinking

In the mind of the chickadee
is a ball of sparks,
a knot of entrails,
the planet’s littlest vacuum.

The chickadee’s mind whistles,
colour fusing to colour.
It smells of beetles’ fears.
It tastes like summer.

Actually, phantoms there
stroll between atoms of moonlight
and lordly Titans gambol
over the seemingly endless vistas.

There are great thoughts,
and these crackle like spruce tinder.
Like soda bubbles, but they weigh tons
and feel barbed to the touch.

Like wind over a hilltop.
Like lines intersecting wires.
Like smoking campfires of the Mongols,
as seen from a blood-red sky.

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