By Bruce McRae
On My Refrigerator
A house drawn by a child.
Purple and crooked windows.
A big yellow sun smiling at a cloud,
a single sad and silvery cloud.
And what I think might be a tree
in a yard with a broken fence,
with a pathway winding nowhere.
And little m’s flitting here and there,
black and fretful, like bats or birds.
Like harpies battling storms and winds.
Demons in confederacy with witches.
Souls escaping their earthly bonds.
Penciled phoenixes rising in the unseen
airs of a crayon’s ashes.
Monstrosity
Monsters are nature’s way
of telling us we’re beautiful.
They sleep all day
so as not to frighten the sun away.
Leaving ruin in their wake,
they can be very expensive to love or own.
*
This little monster scared children.
This little monster trashed homes.
This little monster razed London.
This little monster wept into the night.
And this little monster ate toes.
*
Are you the monster that was
the monster that wasn’t a monster?
Are you the monster from Munster, mister?
Are you another fallen angel,
another messenger from hell?
*
Hallowed evening, the dead come to life,
rain falling hard on Monster Town,
a high wind shrieking in the eaves.
The one night of the year
monsters can leave the house
and no one screams in their presence.
When we toy with terror.
*
Fear is relative to other fears.
*
Dear Monster: According to the dictionary
you’re an imaginary creature,
typically large, ugly, and frightening.
In the wake of such sweeping accusations
how would you care to reply?
*
Lusus naturae and miscreation.
Freak. Mutant. Hellion. Fiend.
In other words, you’re still a monster.
A horror, we are horrified.
You eat people like onions.
You lunge at us in the dark.
You stand in the storm, outside society.
The winds howl. The branches tremble.
*
There’s nothing worse than a beautiful monster.
Worse than creatures haunting your conscience.
Worse than the beast that devours courage.
When you look into a beautiful monster’s eyes
you too become the monster.
When we show the monsters their own reflections
we see ourselves and scream blue murder.
*
We’ve grown accustomed to monsters.
We rather enjoy their monstrous company.
Wipe away the blood and stink
and it will reveal the face of a child.
In every dungeon and tower
is the voice of a child.
About the poet —
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring
Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with over 1,600 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);
‘Like As If’ (Pski’s Porch); ‘Hearsay’ (The Poet’s Haven).
