Night like a wedge and the wind\u2019s teeth
\nsinking in, fangs oozing
\nsleep-inducing toxins, dreams infected
\nby colours and odours of a mind in flux,
\nof a body at rest.<\/p>\n
Night\u2019s highway. Night beveling water,
\nOrion tucked untidily between
\nAndromeda and Milky Way.
\nNight with a line of light through it.
\nAnd impossibly impatient.<\/p>\n
Or night is a black rose
\nand represents death to the living.
\nLife, its guesstimate, its eyes on stalks,
\nblood minus language, humanity
\nhunkered under wintry blasts, time
\ndigging a trench, undermining underworlds,
\nmaking a bed to lie in it.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m idly studying a chart of the stars,
\ntaking baby steps in an astrophysical gulch,
\none of the living, one of those upside-down people
\njust shy of being wrapped in the ground,
\nbone-tired of the chemical fury.<\/p>\n
Unearthed, the night widens, <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Time past is a house condemned. There was a woman in the sinuous robes We witnessed the forever-kiss, its titanium foil, <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Halloween morning in the year of our Lord, Every night is the first night Here I am. And so here you are too, Heathen Luna displays her charms, and may never again, <\/p>\n <\/p>\n BRUCE MCRAE<\/strong>, 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 the North American Review<\/a><\/em>, Poetry<\/a><\/em> and Rattle<\/a><\/em>. His books are The So-Called Sonnets<\/em> (Silenced Press<\/a>), An Unbecoming Fit of Frenzy<\/em> (Cawing Crow Press<\/a>), Like As If<\/em> (Pski\u2019s Porch<\/a>) and Hearsay<\/em> (The Poet\u2019s Haven<\/a>).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Vers Libre Night like a wedge and the wind\u2019s teeth sinking in, fangs oozing sleep-inducing toxins, dreams infected by colours and odours of a mind in flux, of a body at rest. Night\u2019s highway. Night beveling water, Orion tucked untidily… Continue Reading
\ngrown bigger than the both of us,
\nthe hypothetical \u201cyou and I\u201d contracted
\nin the reading and the writing of a poem.
\nNight like a poem too, I\u2019d venture;
\nvers libre<\/em> of the highest order.<\/p>\nTimes Past<\/h1>\n
\nRooms we\u2019ve loved in are shuttered and dim,
\nemotion either a cauldron of pitch
\nor contemporaneous delusion, the lovelorn
\nissuing cries from offices of an alloy fetus,
\nall lovers touched with amnesia\u2019s selective bounty,
\ntheir marriages either brokered or borrowed.<\/p>\n
\nof a thought, lost in memory\u2019s derelict village.
\nWe were scintillations once, mated,
\none a spirit of water, the other of land.
\nA dread turpitude enveloped us,
\ntwo flaky apparitions caught in the gill-net
\nof temporal drift, in lust\u2019s dolor,
\nthe light scooting through them.<\/p>\n
\nthe pictogram representing a limestone cliff,
\nthe stone foundation of a fossil tower.
\nThere were two nights spent in a fold-out bed,
\nin a sandstone canyon,
\nasleep with the sensuous.
\nLove was the flame and it warmed nothing.
\nNothing, which is the absolute de-boned.
\nA house of intense yearning
\nin the extemporary dazzle.<\/p>\nThis Too Passes<\/h1>\n
\nthe known overshadowed by what remains unknown,
\ndarting glimpses of the lunar surface before dawn,
\nsome boisterous gusts, then a brain-grey sky.<\/p>\n
\nwhen you\u2019re fiddling with the incomprehensible.
\nDragged awake by horses of dreamy cognizance,
\neach night is as dark as the next
\nwhen poring over that which refuses to be perceived.<\/p>\n
\nthe suppositious reader at the start of their day.
\nA couple of ruined gods in the Great Et Cetera,
\ninterplanetary visitors gone off-world,
\nwho\u2019ve both lost their stars and sense of depth perception,
\nrollers crashing as we stumble ashore, our ship gone down,
\nthe theoretical gulls out-screaming the local banshees;
\nthe souls of fallen women, according to folktales.
\nAnd why not? Everything\u2019s unlikely.<\/p>\n
\nevery minute our last, until this too passes,
\nanother falsehood demolished, another demon snared,
\nconsciousness confronting oblivion
\n(the best two falls out of three) and no surrender,
\nno sleepy death, and no deliverance;
\nnot even a drone for the Annihilate to transcend
\nas it walks us into the earth.<\/p>\n
\n
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