Bruce McRae
The Neighbor
We share the same headspace
and howls of derision.
Moonlight avoids us equally.
We're a couple of shadows
in a blackout.
You can't choose your family
and we are conjoined
at the hip and head.
I told him, Your problems
are my problems,
and Buddha replied,
You don't have to be me
to be you, our bloods
thicker than water and mud,
the mailman confused,
the neighbours' cat, a tyrant
of the usual lawns and gardens,
mewling contentedly.
Death pursues me up the driveway.
Time is building its machinery.
Love has gone down
with the ship and I'm hearing
gunshots on the television.
I'm seeing lights in the sky
and meditate on alien intervention.
That this yard needs a new god
and armies of angels
to build us a wall
between ourselves and all.
Oh sweet Christ on a bike,
my neighbour is waving now,
a nod and a wink towards recognition.
Small-talk is a rat chewing on a wire.
Pleasantries are unpleasant.
I told him, I'm not a misanthrope,
I just don't like people.
See? This woman is not my wife.
These children are not my children.
He smiles like a dog that requires petting
and a long walk down a road.
I sacrifice a bull in my mind
and contemplate the effort it takes
to walk on water.
I can taste metal and smell smoke.
I'm like a last candle
and cry out for sanctuary.
I am committed to his slight eviction.
Up A Tree
There was a woman up a tree
and she wouldn't come down
for neither love nor money
and we said lady you're in a tree
and she wouldn't answer smiling
like the cat that got the cream
and neighbours gathered gossiping
and a cop looked up slightly bemused
and the papers sent a photographer
while the wind played merry havoc
through the leaves and branches
and the woman in the tree looked
over the city as evening came in and
a man who I think may have been her
husband coaxed and cajoled the
woman in the tree and night fell hard
and still she refused to take a blind
notice and the crowds dispersed
and the children tired of mocking her
and the lights came on and we went to
bed and in the morning the woman
in the tree was no longer there and the
world went happily about its business.
You Can’t Give it Away
The editor kept sharpening his pencil.
I sat there, a pile of sticks,
a promise half-recalled,
an accident about to happen.
“You never publish what I've written,”
I said, hating the sound of my own voice.
“I'm no miracle man,” said the editor,
“I'm no snake charmer.”
I sat there, a victim
of chance and circumstance,
a travelling salesman of oils and balms,
a lump under the carpet.
“I need to get the word out there,”
I said, lulled into a state of grace.
“I'm a flea without a soul,
a house without a window,
a dog enamoured of a bone.”
The editor leaned back
in his faux-leather wingback chair.
Everything I had to say had been said.
Like a Cadillac in a snowbound ditch,
we were going nowhere.
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.
