Not in the making of the snowman,
but its destruction.
Not its construction,
nor its creation;
neither the sound of the children
nor a foothold gained —
but the warmth, and the wind, and the rain.

Half a sonnet is better than none.
Two are twice as good as one.
It’s not in the winning
of the race begun,
and it’s not the legend of the sun —
this is the beginning —
and the thing is done.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, came to poetry late but has enjoyed a large number of publications in the past 10 years, recently gaining airplay for his poems and songs in the U.K., Australia and the U.S.A. The So-Called Sonnets, is his first book, which this audio poem is an excerpt from. More information can be found on his website: bpmcrae.com.

A fleet of sleek silver people-carriers
snaked through the streets. Night-
choppers hovered noisily as alarms
rang, ignored. There were distractions —
five years of research wasted. A cop
gave me the Evil Eye from which I never
fully recovered. It was unseasonably cool,

which has little bearing on the matter,
but I thought that I should mention
it. This is the harsh reality of which
we have little choice but to confront:
it’s difficult to know what to leave in or
out. I have included the completed form,
and an unsatisfactory sky, bullet-colored.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, came to poetry late but has enjoyed a large number of publications in the past 10 years, recently gaining airplay for his poems and songs in the U.K., Australia and the U.S.A. The So-Called Sonnets, is his first book, which this audio poem is an excerpt from. More information can be found on his website: bpmcrae.com.

A glass of water. But the boy
sees thunderheads and wisps
of cloud cover in the Andes. He
says, “All the rivers in the world
end here,” and dives from the
perilous cliffs, the sea sucking
in, breathing out. A tumbler
of water, and lightning flashes
across the roof of his mouth, a
storm waging war in the tropics
of his fever. “This is where the
oceans are,” he says, the glass
of water too cold to swallow,
waves barging in, weeping out.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, came to poetry late but has enjoyed a large number of publications in the past 10 years, recently gaining airplay for his poems and songs in the U.K., Australia and the U.S.A. The So-Called Sonnets, is his first book, which this audio poem is an excerpt from. More information can be found on his website: bpmcrae.com.

The cosmos set in motion
by a hidden hand,
the world-top wobbling,
an imperceptible bob,
but on a true course,
everything in its place . . .

Sometime during the night
that same hand woke me:
You are older and older . . .
And even darkness dimmed,
its hood over my head,
its game The Terrors.
All to plan, the darkness said.
And no star altered

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, came to poetry late but has enjoyed a large number of publications in the past 10 years, recently gaining airplay for his poems and songs in the U.K., Australia and the U.S.A. The So-Called Sonnets, is his first book, which this audio poem is an excerpt from. More information can be found on his website: bpmcrae.com.

The last postman on Earth,
en route in the City of Serpents,
the balance of his mind disturbed,
the mail sack getting lighter and lighter.
And his breaths shorter.

The one bitten by the black dog.
The one with a dead letter,
a trail of rubber bands and twine
leading to Mrs. Lundquist’s house,
her front gate squeaking.

The last letter in the world,
but the address smeared in the rain,
in the sleet, in the dark of night.
Which arrived sooner than expected.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, came to poetry late but has enjoyed a large number of publications in the past 10 years, recently gaining airplay for his poems and songs in the U.K., Australia and the U.S.A. The So-Called Sonnets, is his first book, which this audio poem is an excerpt from. More information can be found on his website: bpmcrae.com.

Someone said the fields were blue
where the moon had gone to ground.
Someone with drink on their breath
said the fields outside of town
were whited over in early frost.
We few went out to hear the stars complain
about their order and their magnitude.
We passed a last cigarette around,
our talk punctuated by laughter,
our breaths like webbing in the moonset.
Someone said something that stopped us dead,
each of us lost in our own thoughts awhile.
Only then we heard the rippling creekwater
and the cry of the high night overhead.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, came to poetry late but has enjoyed a large number of publications in the past 10 years, recently gaining airplay for his poems and songs in the U.K., Australia and the U.S.A. The So-Called Sonnets, is his first book, which this audio poem is an excerpt from. More information can be found on his website: bpmcrae.com.

Soap is the brother to candles.
A little egg, one incapable
of washing its own face.
A whitefish tackling the rapids
of a bubbly hot bath.
A flower behind bars.
A stone skipping over the waves,
worn smooth by gales and rain,
easily squeezed into a ball
or the most personal of crannies.
Slippery devil, the sound of water
running away with the sink.
The sound of the one hand
scrubbing the other.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, came to poetry late but has enjoyed a large number of publications in the past 10 years, recently gaining airplay for his poems and songs in the U.K., Australia and the U.S.A. The So-Called Sonnets, is his first book, which this audio poem is an excerpt from. More information can be found on his website: bpmcrae.com.

All the murdered poets rising from the seabed,
who stride ashore through the murderous surf,
crowned in kelp, in gowns of whitewater,
‘slumbering Thebes’ on their kill-cold lisps,
who said dead before all others, then died,
maddened by such minds and pills and firewater,
self-murdered by the very thing, the poetry . . .

Inglorious death by insult to the brain.
Death by ocean-going steamer. Death by bridge.
Death by oven, shotgun, whiskey, love.
A question for these dancers in the sand:
Which came first, the utter madness or the line?
Just one word, just a skeletal hand on a bloodied page.
I saw it was a name like theirs, written over and over.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, came to poetry late but has enjoyed a large number of publications in the past 10 years, recently gaining airplay for his poems and songs in the U.K., Australia and the U.S.A. The So-Called Sonnets, is his first book, which this audio poem is an excerpt from. More information can be found on his website: bpmcrae.com.

We wore each other thin,
a slow grinding, like corn or teeth.
We visited the seaside,
its littoral rank a suspected balm,
the sea a broken mirror,
the sea an unmade bed,
the sea a blood oath left unsaid.
And the ocean wasn’t big enough.

Our time passed like a marching band.
We took to the air, like chickens,
the two of us grown smaller,
cold Canada coming closer,
the light between us pale as stars,
the sky getting darker and large.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, came to poetry late but has enjoyed a large number of publications in the past 10 years, recently gaining airplay for his poems and songs in the U.K., Australia and the U.S.A. The So-Called Sonnets, is his first book, which this audio poem is an excerpt from. More information can be found on his website: bpmcrae.com.

Limbo, where queues reach toward
the infinite to form a mathematical
construct of hypothetical proportions.
The restless dead, awaiting judgment,
fidgeting impatiently as eternity
unfolds gradually, their expressions
strained, their gazes locked onto
the Great Beyond, emotionless, yet
somehow familiar. As if they’d met
each other many times on a street
in the corporeal plane or had perished
arm in arm. Faces frozen at the hour
of death. An incomprehensible death,
which too unfolded, very slowly.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, came to poetry late but has enjoyed a large number of publications in the past 10 years, recently gaining airplay for his poems and songs in the U.K., Australia and the U.S.A. The So-Called Sonnets, is his first book, which this audio poem is an excerpt from. More information can be found on his website: bpmcrae.com.