Bruce McRae

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).

Quick Assessment

You look like a dog
that’s just been shown a card trick.
You look as if your kitten has gone missing.
Like someone has casually mentioned
your mother is not your mother.
That your soup is too hot and too cold.

Instead, why not bow to a different master?
Why not go down to the sea
and throw stones at the waves?
Or let me put it his way; a pig grows fat
but a hog gets slaughtered.

What Madness Is This?

They’ve arrested the bluebirds
for having dared to sing.
There are peacocks in chains.
Parakeets are forgotten about,
down in the cold dungeons
they assure us don’t exist.
Even the doves are not above suspicion.

“Tell us what you think you know,”
the Inquisitor demands of a chicken,
the poor dumb cluck
blinking with incomprehension.
Its bloodied feathers ruffled.