The Heavens Over Lighthouses
Sounds of your memory—what does
It mean, all of those diseases:
Thinking and thinking of Colorado
Where my mother was born outside of Denver—
In just a little slip of a vale—
In a house next to a house built by a blind man—
Against all of those busied echoes up against
The canyons:
Maybe she was in love with her brother when she
Was in her youngest years:
But she graduated high school, got married
And had children—and her husband—her husband
Is my father:
Man from
Michigan—fat as a hummingbird over the used car
Ports and junk yards—while all of the time
Around his neck a beautiful sun weighing him down like
A jewel—
He was too busied to understand,
Or to truly be in love with her: my mother—my mother—
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Day of Celibate Rain
Day of celibate rain,
Stamping the tomfoolery of birds
To the line.
Maybe the last time I saw your eyes
Was in high school graduation-
You said goodbye,
And now the rains, they keep up what the
Customers should,
They dampen boxes and wet wood.
And I know your name
While the airplanes go leaping,
Leaping on the weathered planes;
But it is so lonely not having you here,
And the rain makes me realize just how absolutely
Good it is to be alone,
Without a son drafted from your silver
Womb,
Without a plumber for his tomb:
And I want to think of your eyes somewhere
In the curtains of this weather,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Paychecks Of Lost Men
Dying figments unsuited for these hours
Sit underneath the dabs of wasps,
Or at the corners of her cheek where she lives:
In the pornography of rusting cars,
Or at the sad confines of the canal:
Floating along in her trailer park underneath
The washout heavens of those
Billboards trying to sell their god to the highway-
When she smiles, a long ways off,
She can see her children even if they cannot
Recognize her- and it is her art form to do this,
And to sit beautifully alone,
Pleasuring herself as if she believed in ghosts:
Like my own childhood where I remember sitting
With my mother and reading books
Underneath skyscrapers and landmines of sunshine:
Or leaning over to see our doppelgangers in the
Canal,
The tadpoles swimming with the paychecks of
Lost men: reticent to transform,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Showers Pouring
Pure torture shackled Prometheus
In front of the television in the middle-
Of South Florida:
The carpet red, the curtains velvet,
The air-conditioning expensive blowing.
The brochures said for a short holiday,
But the ants have already found the cracks
And trail of breadcrumbs, so along his
Grayish shanks they are crawling;
He quivers trying to remain politely
Knowing there are gods about, though maybe
They’ve all gone down the street where
He can hear the lions roaring, and there
Was just a car-accident, and the ambulance is
Coming, and right now the studio audience
Is laughing, and above him like so many
Hindu gods, the ceiling fans are pirouetting;
And Cupid and Psyche are chewing bubble-gum
Over by the piano, playing awful romancing.
The cat is purring, and the dog is snoring,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Their Happenstance's Gold
Impoverished bodies- you roam, as wolves reintroduced
Themselves into your abandoned home:
Your wives, your daughter- forgotten and swimming inside
Pools,
And sloping down from there: canals, and canals-
Lost toys floating away-
Cenotaphs of conquistadors half dredged up- languidness of
Pain and broken chastity:
Girls on roller skates who once hoped to make their own
Music in the rain,
Now with scabbed knees, weeping weeping, head down
In the palmettos- taking sips form flasks of the
Half escaped dwarfs:
Latin graffiti on their broken down bodies- tattoos of never
Found boyfriends
And windmills:
And looking up there, funneling across the soccer field
That some poor Mexican just mowed:
More of the horror coming down the yard, souping up the song
Birds, killing away the hours,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Ever Setting Sun
They dont keep their kilns anymore I still write poetry,
And those who blow glass are imperfect,
As the day fails into night over the golf courses and beautified
Apartments of America or Disney Word
And when the heart strings get into the gut of her,
She can rise up and sing to the dolphins she will
Never see except for on the television
And then she will go down again-again, letting her first born
Suckle upon her breast
She will never know what it means to celebrate Christmas:
Christmas, as my first wife will never know
She will rise up in another world, from a bed made of
Dinosaurs and vampires yawning: she has never seen or
Even heard of the woods but for now she is my muse,
And her arms stretch in yellow branches
Never knowing what she does to me as I think of the
Children we will make to become
Underneath the overpasses of the ever setting sun.
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Rattlesnake's Chant To The Hunting Bird
Hunting birds scream that they should
Have seen the fish in the river,
The girls in the stream; but they have to
Settle for rattlesnake and his tambourine;
He chants hissing,
I will make you see what I have seen,
From my belly along the streams
The girls who are chanting to the sailors
They feed, They will never love you,
Never love you- Strange hungry bird,
Though you might look good in the sun,
From side to side, we will make you hear
What we have heard- The women who desire
Your sense of flight but not your love.
Feed us if you will to your children, but you
Are just not enough that thing- Women shall love neither
Of us, laughing on their school bus- but we
Do not desire them. We gave them their first
Knowledge, their first death, their first reason
To orgasm, and for us that is enough- While you
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Purple World
If all of a peacock was purple
It would be a star—
No cerulean or evergreen—
No place for
Mermaids to admire it—
Purple fanning underneath the sun,
Showing all of the tourists—
All of the housewives that he is
A man—maybe if they could love
Through an everyday metamorphosis,
They would wish upon him—
To feed him popcorn
And to make love to him—
The usual hijinks between the orchards
And the highways—in the singing
Prisons where they they—
But it is not possible for them to think of
Him as anything else than a peacock,
Even if all of purpled fanned—
Though he is more beautiful than them—
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Measures of Feral Elements
Pummeling, tremulous:
The sounds of fierce eloping- the tragic existence
Of all parts starving,
Eating all at once- the planes diving in opulent pristine-
While the girls are working:
And even your girlfriend melting away on a fieldtrip
From high school
Finds unexplainable reasons in the parks she fled to:
Where the bicycles lay down
And are covered by the molestations of sunlight;
But forever the constant roaring-
The graduation of bodies and their modifications up
And down the highway-
Always mobile and newly exposing
The weaknesses of their endangering presumptions:
Because there is a graveyard waiting,
Down from the bricked houses, and the tallow ignited
In the churches:
Restive, like something concluded: resolved
To lay there peacefully under the measures of feral elements;
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Goody-Goody
Swimming with the cadavers of the young,
We pledge allegiance to the flag.
We didn’t quite finish school,
But we don’t feel half-bad;
And there’s a bird that doesn’t swim,
And a girl in training wheels quite young in
The retirement home kicked back
Between the palms;
And a good friend of mine takes his paycheck
From the government,
While you come home and cook for him,
And look at him in his eyes,
Goody-goody;
And when I was in the valley listening for the waves,
Weren’t you in a dream I had,
You politely asked me if you couldn’t feed the horses;
But who cares,
You rolled away with him, and the credits rolled
Like caesuras:
I held my hand over my heart; it became that broken
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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