Waiting For Her To Get On Home
Scarred in all too little ways- waiting for you
To come around, kicking balls,
Your jaw so well outlined in the pullulating rind of
Sun:
And I have cannon balls, and bathroom passes,
And reasons to believe that I am a straight shot of a
Conquistador,
Reason to believe that this last little bit might survive,
Even while the flamingos fart,
And I untie the expensive lace of another flirt,
And you don’t come,
And Disney World is such a trip- decapitated, flash-
Bulbed, waltzing now with the last of the senior
Class still flecking the promenade like the lazy shells of
All the palindromes and paladins:
I do this to check the rigging- To hear the whispers of
Xs of buried wealth, to pretend to stream out on an inflatable
Raft, to take my kindergarten and all its stolen goods out
Underneath some brightly pollinated flowers-
You know the ones, and show the poor boy the topless dwarf,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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New Girl Smell
Houses like limpid shells,
So limpid, smell and taste like their
Previous masters,
Like girls so god-d-mned old;
They no longer smell of the sea
Before it might have been the sea, but of
The wash basins and jet fuel;
They don’t smell like swing sets anymore,
But their daughters are still arcing in
Sunlight:
Their daughters are real play- Just these
Things: believe me, you don’t understand,
Not even if you think you got it on
The tip of your tongue:
Pretty little girls sandcastles, spider-flume,
Arcing in the breaks of God,
But if you lay a hand on them, corrupted:
He will leave them,
This jealously abstaining bachelor:
He will just get on his bike and ride away into
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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She Just Doesn't Care
My dogs fight in a box car of make believe children;
They nock them down like weather-beaten bowling pins;
What am I doing in this city,
With the river so near but not fearful; and yet the correct
English of this is appalling,
Like a fisherman unconcerned there is no bottom:
How will we get to the floor to sleep,
And looking at the phrases critically, as if you are supposed
To interview them for a job: They are paltry at best
They haven’t worked for ages, and who have they loved?
How many other words have they known laid down beside
Them to keep warm after some such and such midnight?
Their vocabulary is poor. Skin. Teeth. All poor; its diseases-
Not fit for mermaids, those topless dancers like selkies
Inciting barfights: And I’m sure I loved her: I sent her bouquets,
But why is the sky blue? The bad news can go on forever
And the fountain of youth is not real: All the conquistadors laid
To rest beside it are so old and unexciting, they put the tourists
Into a gummy eyed malaria; it is their disease. Cheap candles
Are more exciting, open wounds along the bromeliad,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Whatever Rhymes I Choose Tonight
Your friends are super-fine
And I’ve seen them in the back seats
In the back of the bus
Or the movie theatre figuring 69:
And this is what I do when I am not
Hiking,
When my imbedded molars are aching
From cheap liquor,
And I persistent to write in freeform,
Not rhyme:
But there you go, in silent parks which aren’t
Real,
Under slash-pine: sweaty, humid and recreational
In the daytime:
They have no sums or parking codes,
But at night they provide shelter for the nocturnal
Scavengers and homosexual hobos:
Beardless, how could you tell Walt Whitman
From most anyone else,
Even his poetry couldn’t keep time;
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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So Amputated In The Black and White of An Out of Date Newspaper
I can’t use a dime to call you anymore,
So I look at you red-eyed in photographs,
And your face looks like the tanned rainstorm of
A pretty girl’s misplaced secret desires.
Why are you so sad, Erin- Is it because you are
The last of your kind, and everyone else has failed
You. Aliens in their garden of hotdogs and baseball
Parks- Then you are like me, oh sad thing,
What a vermilion holocaust you give the dusk
When you stand out in your front yard flaunting like
A tenebrous ornament for the homeless black men,
Or whoever else comes around,
As the wayward misfits of your neighborhood are
Always courting the comfortable sound of your
Doorbells-
But you don’t read me anymore, because last time
You thought of me, it was by a different name; and
I don’t know who you love even though seven years
Ago I used to jog around you hoping to soup up some
Kind of homeopathic love potion; and even again,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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She Is Not Mine
The dog walked down the street
Where her eyes were languid above him,
Suckling child-
And I cried, my eyes really moped,
Because the child was not mine,
And even more beautiful because the child was
Not mine;
Of needing lips not mine;
And I watched her leave for buses home-
And they were not mine;
All I had to do was lie in bed and jack off,
While the souls of tin birds crenulated against
The upstairs porch with the broken-down
Jacuzzi that molded and grew with the ululations
Of tadpoles and unfortunate princes, puckering undiademed:
And I wanted her lips, and ping-pong-
And the shadows stretched throughout the weeping
Hallways of the school,
The smoked out bathrooms,
The unicorns in the soccer field, the cherry red
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Where I Remain Dreaming
When the lions germinate they are asleep:
The airplanes are silver quarters in the arcade of cerulean sky:
And this is south Florida, or this an arcade:
And the lights are out, but the power lines, like camels,
Are still good for something:
And the canals form a safety grid so that the afterlife of
Crocodiles doesn’t flood in and disturb our Christmas;
And I don’t know what better words to use
To become the special place of fawning reptiles: If you are not
Around to receive this attention, then make sure to garland yourself
And your daughter in the sweet shade;
For it was never my intention to vulgarize you in the salt-lick plane:
Yes, I have been up the backside of so many mountains,
I have effervesced with blue collar legs from the insouciant of
Ice-cream shops of tourism;
And now why don’t you serve rum, or why haven’t you become
The better iconoclast of my sleepless harem:
Why don’t you turn off the lights and become brail:
Why are you still starving me with empty lunch pales you use to
Build sand castles when you know the tide is coming in,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Like the Japanese
Make for me inside an insouciance with your wonder,
And I will build for you with my muscles,
And these things I say which are steam engines,
And organic turbines; Do not let your eyes become instead
The blunders of the richly accessorized middle-classes,
Do not say those things which are readily understood and
Manageable, but instead ride with me to Mars,
This sort of amusement park made out of fire-axes and
Other pigments given to indigenous holidays. That is what I
Said: Make this life into an aqueduct, a prevalence of my
Scars hung with tinsel, your lips blowing the sawdust of such
Carpentry, your nails newly painted black and draped against
My cheek like the human brand of peacock; Or come with
Me to my grandmother’s grave and let us worship there like
The Japanese, let us spread origami like our bodies, into new
Shapes for Christmas, and let us not mind the way the snowflakes
Drift indefinably unique like little Chalets floating through a
Francophone space, or let us ride away from this back through
The vanished sea the mountains attend, as carefully as explorers
Approaching the epileptic fissures through the persimmon trees.
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Schoolyard's Stormy Vestiges
If it stormed again this afternoon,
I could go back to delivering pizzas-
But they’ve torn down that part of the world
Right near the University nobody knew me in.
I worked beside a cup-bearing goddess
Who I recalled from high school,
And remember getting drunk in the extinct pastures
With my boss who was already married
And reciting of her beside the ungodly apartments,
Everyone else tucked into parties for the night,
Except for the lesbians stripped naked and echoing
In the brightly scarred pool-
I could go back there again, given the opportunity:
I could go all the way back up the root of Loxahatchee,
Sleep into noon in some corrugated trailer underneath
The Australian Pine trees,
Fish in my own secret pond, take my catches to bed
With me, singing how god is the creation of man-
And when he walks out of the liquor store,
His boots made out of the last reptilian vestiges of the
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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What I Meant By Being Sincere
Let me nuzzle up to your gorgeous golf
Courses,
To the bows in your swayed esplanade:
Let me ruin endings and
Airplanes for you:
Let me talk straight out; Oh, gosh, I’d like
To say your name,
But who are you listening to now,
The baby tugging your long list of satin
Accomplishments;
I’ll just sit here and refrain as one of your hounds.
You help me put down the gun:
And I can pretend for you to be on a ride in the sea,
Each of your sisters nibbling our gunny sides,
My toned biceps scrimshawed with chorus
Lines from Tex-Arkana; say that you remember me
Now, some gumshoe out lost around the
Terrible borders of high-school,
And I’ll gallop you all the faster to the dinner of
Scallops and sweet disaster,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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