Our Eager Young Possibilities
Kelly wrote a poem to her mother I did not
Read;
But at night I guess I ejaculate the same way,
But to the girl and her friends,
The little fat roses I am too afraid to give away
In the immense daylight of our
Cages;
The way grizzly bears may stop and sniff before
A cerulean tent way deep in the permafrost
Of its alluvial planes, before
It gets down to its businesses of dismembering;
And I don’t love Kelly,
Not in the way I used to, the way a young child
Expects and loves his crackerjack prizes,
Even though they are not enough;
But I suppose I could- She is a beautiful woman
Who can spot dolphins and manatees just as
They go about licking the world,
Metamorphosing practically out on the surface world,
Like adolescents unsure of their graduation;
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Poltergeist Biding Its Time
Boats of a long-lipped scar:
I play the housemaid of a truant, I don’t get too far:
When I was a ghost, I made it all the way
To Spain,
But when I died as ghost, living I came back home
Again;
And the city, and the village grew with invention,
And you could hear what they were making all night through
The swift toed streets.
They made those too, and the university, and the halogens
Over the soccer filled stamped with cleats;
And I loved a girl there,
I suppose:
I loved a girl there from the rose bushes no body
Knows;
But I had already died there.
I had already been eaten by the swifter avenues of the petty
Men-
The petty men who got her first and afterwards she wouldn’t
Let me in;
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Flying Monkeys
I’m calling on you because I’m a wreck,
And I used to dream of becoming a professor when I
Jogged around the junked golf course
By the side of deep twilight, and the paltry swathed condominiums:
To tell you the truth, I haven’t loved too many women-
Mostly, I’ve been able to count them on two hands
And you rank right up there,
But now my legs are cold from drinking cheap rum:
Can you love a man without any fashion sense
Or social position?
A man terribly wounded in the dark of a fraternity’s
Pick-up truck, so he doesn’t even know where he’s
Hurt, but he just remembers you sometime in
North Central Florida before Halloween in that Asian
Restaurant joint now demolished on 13th street;
What the F-, now it flows- now it flows- I don’t
Yet have a bicycle or a home on an island, but give it time:
And the girl I neglected by dreaming of you has a new
House and better ways to make her living;
And this is not good, and now I don’t care to teach anything
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Muted Creche
Florida is returning to the way she looked
Just before the sixteenth century,
The conquistadors swimming in their bloody
Bouquets and hang-over hard-ons:
All the lost tribes are showing their faces as
The hybrids of our new species:
Guatemalans and Cubans and Haitians and
Columbians,
Swimming up stream and making love like
A kaleidoscope lost in a
Sweaty, irrational poem: What would be a
Disaster from the white man and his college
Professor,
Except for the fact that these women are beautiful,
And the bring over priced lunch,
All the roundnesses of their body like ripe
Fruit,
Like the clichés of a lunch basket passed between
Business partners;
And they all have exquisite names with three or
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Innocence's Byway
How innocence wanders the innocuous highway,
How, bearded, he dreams of the thigh he’s
Never touched,
As he sleeps in the weeds like a disposed general
Of a hungry army without any shoes,
Believing in his forthcoming victories, and preserving
How he might end up at her, and take her
By the hand, and by the subtle dissolutions of
Armistice, become sort of a Disney movie with her
Belly distended like a parade balloon,
Little children in a line and hung around the
Doublewide trailer at the mouth of the babysitting
Swamp,
The humid dulcets of the arachnid menageries,
The spider webs breathing in the corners of green rafters,
The nameless dogs chewing on the knobs of corn,
As the light flows like wet paint down the overgrown
Pines and deciduous hardwoods,
Where death is an old creeper who has yet to contain
The shoots of red, or the discarded exoskeletons spiked
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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This Lighthearted Responsibility
I smell the clefts of books in place if finding the
Face of Wallace Stevens.
And I would otherwise want to be anywhere, enlightened,
Stretched out like a cherry and golden worm:
Sure we can all graduate from the enlightened point of state college,
But how can we still touch ourselves while the paint is still
Drying;
And now I have a scar on my temple that will soon disappear,
While you are still speaking uneasily to yourself;
And all the pretty girls grow like hedges, let them grow untamed and
Feral; and they will grow just like Constantine’s balloons,
While I keep the high grade liquor between my legs,
And they keep publishing things that they cannot know, while all of their
Problems grow and grow; and their problems keep on getting multiplied,
While of their cities can find themselves trapped inside in slow
Motion, galloping on their ponies like the private séances
Of the waves and hibiscus; while the water moccasins prance,
And all of the stolen bicycles are stolen into the trances of watery bridges;
And the teal-high mothers don’t have any other words for it other than that
They are all spent on the trail head and that they are all but ready to become
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How Many Legs I'll Have To Lose
You’ve combed your hair again and I am drinking wine
I bought tonight after I left you at that party in wounded
And high weeded guts of
West Palm Beach: the grapes are from the grandes bodegas
Where the poets rest in the trenches of lime,
And I jogged today after I left you Alma over the waters and
Into the soft terrain of the rich man’s homes,
And they made me smile and think of you, because you are
So beautiful that you could fit into any of those homes and
Make them smaller;
And how you’ve cast your eyes out of buses traveling far
And to the east;
And how you’ve never seen the Wizard of Oz, and I never
Want to have to fire you:
I feel like a torch in a warm dungeon full of booby traps when
I am nearer you:
I feel like a teenager slipping away from school to bask in his
Pastimes of cemeteries which border the teal tennis courts
Where the topless din mothers and their professional sisters play
At ease in their early retirement:
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Assertions of Torpidity
If I stare at you too long,
You may be mistaken that I want something,
But even though you represent a beautiful
Object going nowhere with a busy background
Of traffic,
I am only waiting like you, for things to come
My way and then depart;
Or maybe you are waiting for the bus?
Or on your mother, or the ice-cream truck?
Did I tell you I’m attempting to finish my
Fourth novel this year? It should be my last,
For I don’t want to seem intolerably desperate,
Though its quite easy as long as you shouldn’t
Be bothered with publication,
Or that I saw my dog drool on a swarthy
Caterpillar, which sounds vaguely romantic, but
Turns out to be rather gross, like most
Acts when they get down to the nitty-gritty.
Are you like me, preferring tomboys to bimbos,
And find it rather sad when flushed women graduate
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No Sea
There is no sea here,
I see no sea;
This is the body of the desert,
The rich made faint blue,
From stolen oceans,
And it is where I live now;
In the dizzy trail of the sleeping conquistadors,
In your memory,
And the super-market sample of love
You gave me to try some many years ago:
Here the cactus I pricked my thumb on,
And this one has stolen my jersey;
These are the naked declivities,
The changing rooms absent of shadowy abdomens,
The red stones of stolen Indian reservations,
The retirement homes for snow birds;
The corrugated roofs where no rain falls,
While your lips peck his opium neck,
His steroid elbows,
His cocaine phallus: I walk out into the naked abscesses
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Picasso's Pugalist
All I can really say is that my new face
Looks like Picasso got punched,
And that’s okay: a little crooked, like President
D$ck, unsymmetrical, but big,
Like Dolly Parton’s tits- Some things which
Are real: speedy motorcycle, hearse’s right-of-
Way, sea-shanties which stormy areolas mermaid:
The phone rings from another planet,
Or demoted Pluto- I think its just you, but it never
Is: Solicitors, tax collectors, sisters.... Rivers
Run to the sea, but that is not where you can find me,
So for very long I’ve been reading naked in the igneous
Rockslides of her undraped back, crooning-
Video games say I’m overweight, but they’re stupid,
As the hands arrest empty Michigan, your groom’s
Flannel tuxedo accordions- When you didn’t answer,
As you can see, it was a Holocaust, a default,
The bankruptcy of a favorite super center- The trick
Lady’s overweight shoulders shrug, and we light off
Fireworks: Semis honked, this is the great America stretching
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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