Three Poems || Bruce McRae

Forget Me Not

According to statistics
one of us is mad,
two of us are murderers,
three of us have gone the way
of the mail order catalogue –
we are unnecessary and old,
like shoes out of fashion,
like sedans at the auto wreckers,
like the ones you loved
so long ago you can’t remember
their names or faces.
You chew the rag of memory
and can’t remember.


Incommunicado

My true love calls from a fold in the earth,
her voice a lengthening shadow,
her voice a high cloud in winter.
My true love calls from an airliner’s berth.
From an inconvenient crag on a Hollywood back lot.
From a fault under the ocean.

My heart is a chalk outline of a body.
My heart is an immigrant’s untold struggle,
her one true voice mispronouncing my name,
sounding like a bell ringing in a baby-blue sky,
my beloved’s voice shining like a new penny.
Like a match struck in a mausoleum


Governance

It’s a machine made for flying, possibly.
Or it’s designed to travel underwater –
we, the committee, have yet to decide.
Long meetings into the night but we’ve yet to choose
from a spectrum of eye-watering colours.

Let’s throw money at it, the chairwoman declares,
her campaign promises long a thing of the past.
And make it streamlined, demands a senator.
Make the machine make other machines.
It shall bear our sponsor’s crest and have no purpose.