The Real Work Begins
I enjoy the irony of not being taken out to dinner,
For writing bad poetry, and getting
Away with it: And when the leggy substitute drops
Like a bombshell into the room, to watch movies
For the rest of the period,
And notice the canopy of her interior skeleton
Heave like a buxomy pink tarp as she sits at
The head of the class, inhaling, flickering her temporary
Eyes over the rows of boys.
They lick their lips like suburban wolves as she
Crosses her legs and her long-distance calves
Flex: She exhales and it smells like rum, from
What the pirates have done to her:
I don’t care, I still want her, and contemplate
Asking her to prom, or abducting her on the way
Out to her car, and thank god this isn’t math, or
I wouldn’t know what to do; but now I have a plan,
And I doodle a map on the desk, which spills like
A silkworm’s womb onto my hand, a pubescent jig-saw
The Mexican lady will wipe clean over night,
[...] Read more
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
What You Have Pretended To Save
Kiss me on either side of my face,
If you are from Seville
And it is your whim: Play your radio and
Back off,
As old men drive away back through the
Perfidy of their adolescence:
Think of the time you spent mocking me in
High school,
The cumulostratus or whatever you call
The flying holocaust it put me through:
Build up and pull over and make love at the
Anonymous road stop underneath the
Great stone bridges where the Indians died
Or at least gave way,
Because you are the greatly educated:
So proud of yourself and your football teams.
Your bedroom is full of red and blue ribbons,
Either coming or going away,
But it is just a very thin wall, thankless,
Persuaded,
[...] Read more
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
In Each Lock of Your Hair
I love the way your hair curls through
The ribbons and the gold;
It seems to me the laughter of children prancing
Around a Maypole,
With the hair-suited creatures out and pullulating:
This is something sincerely pagan-
It really doesn’t exist anymore,
And I try and mouth it to the briny star,
But the traffic roars and pulls
Filled with things too fast to care,
True and modern gods to plush and placate to,
But it exists in your hair in this time,
The cheerless castles and their wan girls,
Their grotto’s water-dragon’s aquatic swirls, the spume of
Fairies in the waves
Make invisible phosphorescent too ephemeral
To be proved,
[...] Read more
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Mulatto Children
How loudly the quietus barks,
Diana: Liquored up, lighting up the woods,
Our four legged body decorated by
Penumbra-
So far away the holocaust lamps of another sea,
These words I use,
Young goddess, one breasted, leaping at the
Form,
Airplanes bowing beneath her:
I see her sometimes as I am coming out of the gym,
Or when I am vacationing onto the
West part of Florida.
Archaeologists are gathering around her like kids
In daycare,
Undressing her splendiferous hip,
Speculating,
Speculating: Luscious bride of all the colors and
Elements,
Sometimes water and sometimes greening wood;
And now the cars are passing, streams of little girls:
[...] Read more
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Common Courtesy
What does my heart feel like now;
But it feels like a long poem wanting more the
Poisons of my muses of putrescent Janus;
Looking both ways from the doorways of these
Awful purple valves,
While there are little keyholes of vision,
Then the crickets and golf balls, and the wickedness
Of water-breathing reptiles in the tall grasses of
Head-shaven cannibals:
I awakened this day of my third decade and asked a
Girl out for the first time,
And she said she couldn’t because she said she was
Not mine;
I asked a girl out for the first and for the last time,
And the candles melted under the pillow of unanswered
Virgins,
And I slouched off to the sea alone in my diesel truck
With the amphibian airplanes leaping above the ankles of
These almost vanished Titans;
And I thought of my muses, but paid to be laid by a little
[...] Read more
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Wishing That It Had Never Happened
The fine young make-believes have already started
Shooting in:
From the gated communities of Parkland they’ve
Drifted,
And young Italian girls take photographs of each other,
And I take photographs of them:
They are venal and cottage cheese-
They will go to college, or they’ll do as they please:
Like you, they might make love to me,
If they have to, but they will never fantasies over
These estuaries as I have had to:
How I’ve tried to compare you to the muses of
Baudelaire, the two strangers made sisters by his
Pervasive charges,
The sick muse and the venal muse: I didn’t remember
That before you used to play soccer together,
But who as really in charge;
And if you’d won the season for our white tributary,
What then would have stopped your taught calved
Sorority from kissing under the bleachers,
[...] Read more
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
I Still Keep For You
I remain on our corner,
Where the moon is hung as you left it,
Where the light pools down as if on
A stage, turning the neighborhood blue
With the somber possibility;
I am still here,
Holding my gift for you,
My eyes beholding the last image of
You, how you moved like an ibex
Grazing with beautiful legs
Across our teenage suburbia
How your attention lit upon me
For no more than two weeks and
We made loving play on those old hunting
Grounds of Latin class, before new
Men startled you into their forests
Where kings saw you bathe with the
Dryad Galaphile, in the emerald tinctures
Where your legs scissor with the sadness
Of crocodiles
[...] Read more
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The Illusions Of Its Joy
I love you more than my cousin of silent thought—
As the blue cat, enamored of Indian headdress, sated by
Porcupines and the first European explorers to this
Region,
Stares from the perch of her dunes
To the silent fumbling of the chaos in the architectures
Of the sea—of a beauty I have never seen before—
And the cenotaph in the waters,
Granite cross, way post for the men who will have
To eat their horses and make rafts out of their ribcages-
Before the Castillo de San Marcos—
The first retirement city coughed a cannon ball across
The bay—and there was any other fantasy we could believe
In—Disney World and the diseases of gated communities—
Before my tiny nostrils first flared—or I walked the streets
Smelling the night blooming jasmine with a woman
Who was not meant to stay with me—
There was this void in a feral heart—
Already some of the heavens had already died—
And your eyes had not yet awakened to your mother,
[...] Read more
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The White-Washed Sea
White bread and white maids,
Marmalade and sugar tarts: stick me
High atop the citrus tree,
Like a paper airplane, paper nose pointing
The way to the white-washed sea:
Pretty dolls and forget-me-nots,
Ivory beavers slapping dams,
Lover-boys in snowy trams making their
Procession to the white-washed sea:
Tourists there, Mickey-Mouse, and fricassee,
Conquistadors jounced on vanilla poles,
Saints and crosses like Spanish scarecrows on
Concrete atolls, bleed anemically towards
The white-washed sea: Hills of windmills are
Picaresque, lovely cherries on her white washed-
Breasts, bones of birds and pica ninnies;
Aunts sing cantos at their nieces nurseries,
Pale and freckled and on their knees,
Girls who’d been roller-skating as if on foam,
Stop and pray to the white-washed sea;
[...] Read more
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The Glorious Ways
Your brown body pulls me across the desert,
Just as desirable as the luck of the hares in your overgrown
Backyard:
You do this to me in your ways, swaying like the séance of
A metamorphosing violin:
There you are
Crenellating the last calls of a fortress like the signals for life
Over the nameless hills
And the tourists mulling like jackanapes in the soft golf courses
Of icecreams;
And that you were so rude as to bother the sky with your eyes
That way,
Whose most direct of senses found their way across the fronteras
To Texas and your old backyards,
Calling up my dreams to meet your soul;
The involuntary arrows you plucked me from across the streets
Of our work places
Until I kissed and laid you down into the newest grottos under
The chicken wire stars where the films had just started shooting,
And there alongside the carport where my mother
[...] Read more
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!