If you put your ear to a stone
you can hear the earth being born.
If you eat a tree
your breath smells like houses.
(weep, willow, weep)
When winking at a clock
you travel in time;
but you have to really want it,
like sitting on an egg.

Please, bear with me . . .
An astronomer is someone
snooping through the stars’ curtains.
Snow is like an unread newspaper.
(blow, wind, blow)
Sunshine is an eyeful of planets.
Dancing bears destroyed life’s tapestry.
No two people drink water alike.
And I’ve an umbrella made of fishes.

Yes, this very spot, under that nickel,
is where we’ll establish
an irrefutable calm.
This is where the ouroborous
of malcontents
becomes a green, keen
thinking machine.
Here’s where we turn
flowers into men,
gasps into groans,
pillows into pillboxes.

There’s a spike in a punchbowl.
A hurricane with a black eye.
An old tomcat hissing at a bitch.
(I couldn’t write this fast enough)
You need to turn three times
and rub spit in your hair.
When a galaxy implodes
an angel dies in its sleep.
When a telephone rings
certain creatures in the Caspian Sea
weep unsalted butter.
The town of Dum Dum is in India.
And I have my very own
personal thunderhead.

It’s true, if you drink lightning
you’ll piss sparks.
A hog is our governor!
A letter arrived,
addressed simply to ‘You’.
The infamous thinking-cap
is listed as for sale:
still in its original packaging.

And leastwise, but not lately:
A witch weighs less than a bible.

—

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with well over a thousand poems published internationally in 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” (Pskis Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).