Our Brief Estate

Week-old moonlight
on a night too dark to mention.
The otherwise bedraggled stars
and their cerulean convention,
myth in the bag with legend.

A seven-minute downpour.
A voice in the abyss.
The wizened crone
and her anthem of laughter.

All this and more
as I contain myself,
chartering a course of action,
dog-smart, but night-simple.

Enter the penitent,
a man no less than a bomb or a bee,
every word a mild contortion,
writing what must never be written.

I like the way he thinks he's thinking,=
his tea-leaf-fortune of wrong or right,
his quasi-philosophical conjectures
concerning coffee cups and hand-rolled cigarettes,
the author of 'Eat This Book'
a man as cunning as an outhouse rat,
a chatterbox of beautiful fiction.

Witness his joke shop jeremiad,
a mind building rice paper palaces,
earth afire, the scrivener transfixed with desire,
whittling his former pastime, poetry
a cardboard cow chewing gum or a cud,
the real world unreal and far more difficult
to navigate than sleepy mediocrity.

Surely there's more to this world
than chasing sleep and counting bullets.
Why not love's tender rush in sevenfold
or the occasional spate of lunacy?
The curtailed heart our want and measure.
Why not skyhooks and the bee at her pleasure

 

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 latest book Boxing In The Bone Orchard is available now via Frontenac House.