LOVE ISN'T AND IS

Love Isn't And Is

A high fever in bed,
love goes a little bit mad.
A thoroughbred with its mane on fire,
it's trampling the last of the roses.

Love is a tsunami of emotion.
A time-bomb on the village common.
A shouting match at the devil's picnic.

Love gets more ludicrous than that,
like musical snowfall or bats in your hair.
Like assassins. Like Mozart's requiem.

Love it to death, it's often been said.
Which seems rather extreme,
though often thought a necessity,
love requiring graces and airs
and not the threat of violence,
every loving kiss held to the throat
like a rusting jackknife.

Love is a sailor's knot of ampersands.
A question mark without a question.
A bloodied footprint in a frosty field.
It sees without eyes and feels without fingers.
A hotbed of misperceptions,
every time you fall in love an angel dies.
Earthquakes increase in their intensity.
A moth takes on an impossible task.

A sensual swarm of multiple experiences,
love is a rat in the governor's kitchen.
It's the ghost that wakes you in the night.
Think of it as a rowboat at the head of the falls.
Think of a church bell brokering summer.

Sound Travels

There is no good noise on this Earth,
neither klaxon nor birdsong,
restful ease taking an ear-bashing.

The willows weep too loudly.
The snooze-inducing sermon
goes on and on for far too long.
Silence is made to be broken.

Asleep, you can't help but listen
to the world humming along,
to star-chatter and moon-song,
to snowfall's rasping clatter.

All these fields of energy,
invisible but for their bluff and guff,
a leaky faucet dropping bombs,
stardust scratching the back of a spoon,
lightning spouting thunder's epitaph,
even your dreams an atonal romping.

Pilgrim, Jericho's walls came tumbling down
and a shot was heard around the world.
Deprived of solace,
all we hear is death asking its questions.
Why the light? It wants of us.
And why the darkness?

More Noise Than Signal

Call it a vague notion or the god's-honest-truth.
That lightbulb moment, the sky burnished blue,
footsteps skipping down the halls of perception,
bells going off, exclaiming aha, eureka,
grey matter scintillating, ganglia sparkling
in the fizz and buzz of intellectual electricity.

Call it a Catharine Wheel or pocketful of bobs and bits.
Call it a scream in the dark, a think-bomb gone off,
the brain wet-wired to an alternate reality.
Call it a psychological barnstorming or voice in the dream-house.
Say a mummy's curse of rationale and reasoning.

A dog in the manger. A hat in the wind.
The mind returning from its maze with a great idea,
leading a reluctant thought out of the underworld,
creating a spark, fuelling a brilliant inception.

The mind, its mental industry and mystery.
A troubled ghost in the brain-machine.
Where each memory is sleeping fitfully.
Some suggest it's the seat of the soul or home for the holy
or birthplace of innocence, others complaining
it's a box of crackers, with too much ballyhoo and banter,
too much of conceptualization's garbled script,
too many shadowy estuaries and hidden recesses.

My mind is a broken chair, a bolus of brain-candy,
a wolf in the snow, a wall scrawled with graffiti.
Like a photon blooming in between the stars,
my best ideas are another language from another time.
Everything, even nothing, means something.

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 next book, 'Boxing In The Bone Orchard' is coming out in the Spring of 2025 via Frontenac House.