Distant Flower
I give long witness to your eyes
Looking for silence.
Where is your child underneath
The mountain- There could be so many
Ways.
I will save her, because I know what
You’re thinking,
And the bus is turning around
Having forgotten so many things.
Maybe she is in the sky, the sky beneath the
Mountain,
Your child, your daughter of so many things.
Words are spit on the window of heady
Vagrancy,
But your eyes are really wonderful,
They go so far away; they see so many things.
The night is a cryptic flower turning in its
Jewelry case,
And you forgot to know who I am in any case.
And your daughter is so far away,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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If She Wasn't Already So Far Away
Twilight drinks itself to sleep and I am
Here doing the same and yawning trying to picture the
Dusky clouds over the
Retiring golf courses and the teenage cemeteries,
And maybe it because that I am not even real
And had to sit tonight behind Romero’s house while his
Special needs nephew had his forth birthday party:
And I sat beside Alma and her mother
And her daughter:
And she wore the dress that I bought her last weekend at
The flea market underneath I-95:
And I got to do this until the man she lives with came in
And sat between us: he had fake diamonds in his ears
As big as a black man’s birds eggs:
I didn’t care: I went home and jogged so far I jaunted past
Where the drunks were fishing and into the rich man’s
Yards and still I jogged, and I jogged,
Thinking that I could still breath in the loneliest perfumes of Alma
If only she wasn’t already so far away.
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Ecstatic Truth
What bedtime stories
Will you choose for your children
To knock them back
Into the poppies to sleep,
My pretties,
To send them snoozing
From their overfed
Satanic Paradise
Caged in a middle-class house
Sequestered by a manicured
Golf-course
Locked with a gate code
The nitric oxide allaying fears
Into the briefest of
Sugar-coated comas?
Certainly not the vulgar
Hypocrisy of your
Communist youth—
That the man you first loved,
Which was I,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Beyond My Window
Beyond my window
The sky blooms in a voluminous garden
The sun attends,
And there my childhood goes wandering
In the thick forest of nebulous—
There is no time on me
And there are no scars—
Gravity is a funny thing that still spins
Like a top in the palm of my hand…..
My heart is not lost in a panting jungle
Of her red fingernails and long, curling locks,
Like chains made of unbreakable feathers,
For now she stalks me without even thinking about it,
A filmy poltergeist doing her life
Five states away near where the East Ocean breathes.
She eats its salts every day and doesn’t even think about it,
The way the world tastes inside of her….
Inside me, she is the romantic acid
Spurting through my soul, taking turns with time
And gravity to bed decay in me….
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Day Is Make Believe
The waves seem to be learning how to fly,
Or just getting up so that they can try:
Yawning like blue eggs brought to the lips,
Overeasy breakfasts of the sun-
Bicycles sunken in their breasts- the complex jewels
That kids lose while playing-
Knees scabbed by slathering kisses, like tears
That good girls give in a swimming sorority:
Blowing kisses across a sunken street where fireworks
Are swimming on holiday;
And you have to keep your head up to see the forts
Floating up in the sky: they were made to be that way,
Like smoking from the bereaving day-
And little dead angels in those halls pinwheel in the
Attractions in which they find themselves,
And laughing giddily as the soft movement is somehow
Rushed through the shallows- taking your hands up to the side of
The sun, because you are my muse- and
As I am watching you, that is how you learn to pray;
And the day is make-believe, and so am I.
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Fully Fledged Flight Attendants
In the city lies the citizens laid quiet off the ejaculating of
The exhausting angels:
Those pretty demigods that put them to work, and then
Sent them back home again,
Down into the jungles and the purple fjords of their deeply
Shadowed
Cribs: perhaps like heroes defeated by their own monsters,
The motifs of satellites nearly invisible in their rooms:
The footprints of super heroes,
The metamorphosis of Cinderella’s brooms: and they go this
Way by the byways of nocturnal rivers,
Pretending that the night blooming jasmine is the only
Thing in the neighborhood that will keep them
Intoxicated, as school comes,
And the ixora blushes and turns into full hedges
Just in the very same time that the youngest sweethearts finally
Grow up and become so leggy that they leap across the continents
Wearing the finery of the heavens on their strapless shoulders:
They are now fully fledged flight attendants.
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Swinging In Her Tomorrow
It seems to be keeping things together:
The fox in the eyes of the girl who isn't even here:
In the playground before the sea:
The only thing that is hiding all of it from her is
The manmade dune that seems to
Say, "I will protect you." Well then the sun
Smiled—and the lights came out
That had previously been selling off of the
Ferris Wheels:
This was the most beautiful joy in the world
And it wasn't even his—
And as she swam in the shallow abysses—feeling
All of a brevity that wasn't even joy—
I remembered the echoes of another's knuckles
Rasping upon the thresh holds—
And whatever joy that may have once been—
Left as if it was a clouded airplane from
Her eyes—and set off for those parts
That were barren and without swing-sets:
And whatever joy there remained, swinging in her tomorrow—
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Underneath The Clouds
Broken adventures moving against the
Stream:
This is my family,
And these are the few words I know-
And none of it belongs here:
These yards and houses do not belong,
Nor the airplanes leaping over them,
Nor the girls here
Who are shortly to be women: women,
Long-legged,
Bronzed women of a special cast-
They who will know their families like fishing
Leaping
Fast- fast:
Women of the year: women of a single snowflake
Evaporating underneath a single sun:
My words are just for her,
Women- my words are meant to be the flower
That signifies the metamorphosis of
Everything,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Unabashed Bouquets
Upon the higher back of the albatross
It rains, it floods;
And if I am not beautiful by now,
I will be beautiful by then: I can see by the lights
That my father put in
As he whipped me, as I wrote the novels that no one
Reads,
I killed the dragon by which my friends were sewn
But never fed:
Beautiful irony of the butterfly crushed on the super
Fine roadway;
But I am no longer afraid: I still have my dreams,
By my scars,
By my liquor glass- I still have my friends,
Even if I should have died high up on the wild
Back of the buffalo,
Never read, by the red lips of wild flowers, the unabashed
Bouquets the dead Indians dead in the gutters
Of the old fashioned roadways: Again, I loved you,
Erin, but you are too busy serving the truancies of your
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Her Three Untimely Swings
It feels to me that I am here,
In a candelabrum, in a sugar bowl- swimming around,
Looking out at the distortions of the dinner
Guests swimming like flies all around the caesuras of death
Which has them surrounded and out manned:
But for awhile they glow like goldfish in the midway of the greatest
State in all of America:
They glow like the fulcrum of Halloween, and they sing outside
Of the schoolyards and into churches,
Passing around:
Until they spill their own ways into monuments and dog tracks,
Until their particular unction takes hold
And they become fully developed the same way as metamorphosis
Or evaporation,
And the fingerprints you left on them like a lover’s evidence,
Disappear, or linger: and it is their shoulders that disappear
With their last names or whatever; while another
Thing even more lovelier than them gets up to
Bat at the plate of your breast work to take her three untimely
Swings.
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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