Bruce McRae - Three poems

1. To The Powers Of Twelve

Two-faced January,
frigid February,
a baneful March.
Falling through the numbers,
April vindictive,
May the animal
we’ve long suspected.

A sudden June has befallen us,
planets in regression.
A heated July.
An argumentative August,
its fugs and thunders.
September made of wax.
Luscious October,
posed provocatively,
like a cold shower.

November undressed.
The bastard-child
they coined December.
A blow to the sternum.
A lowly servant
to reason’s master.

***
2. The Palm Of My Hand

Render unto Caesar, sayeth the taxman,
his face like a final demand,
his face like a stormy Monday morning.
Like a door kicked in.

Your name is underscored in red,
thus spaketh the taxman, his jaw clenched
like a fist, like a knotted rope of hair.
His words were spit and bitten.

Discomfited, for want of another term,
I examined closely the holes in my hands.
My mind wandered childhood’s summers.
I lay in the tall grass and surrendered sweetly.

***
3. Wrong-Headed Prophet

I’ve a face like a torn curtain.
A face like a punched wall or rat’s dinner.
Like a smoking battlefield.
What Shakespeare would tag rudely stamped
and curtailed of fair proportion.

A stranger in stranger times,
a frightener of small children,
I’m not the prettiest angel in the choir,
my face like a crumpled map
jammed in haste to the back of drawer.
Like a dog chewing a hornet
or car crash on a desert road.
Where few are known to travel.
Where the unloved walk alone.