Half An Artist

I look so troubled with ringlets which
Make like hungry mouths of little birds,
Or knots of wood around my eyes;
And is that why you are going, my pantomiming
Love,
Exiting the revolving stage, leaving the
Audience in such a hush, never to reveal again
Your burnished areolas like sand dollars which
Marked you as the half cousin of the mermaid
Topless at the biker bar somewhat inland
On the southeast coast of Florida?
I spread my lips and imbibe the poison which
I must drink to expel the memory of you,
Like a German translation, like a slight holocaust
In sexy lingerie; but it’s just pulp fiction-
Over eager, I’ve begun digging up the roots of
The dragon’s teeth Cadmus planted before his friends
Were fully formed and riotous,
And so it is with you: Even with all these scars,
Battle wounds, truancy badges which should send you

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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Gravestones Which Say Their Names

The prom queens are in disguise,
Brushing in their raiment, slipping like anorexic
Manatees into the green goodbye,
And the world is overheating, panting like a tortoise
Who has eaten too much of the deep orchid,
And is feeling nauseous watching the tourists go by,
Growing around the beautiful mermaid slapping with
The coy otters who can’t think but smile,
And soon we will be selling fireworks, and I will be
Getting paid; Even sooner still, someone will slip away,
Forgetfully and finally, the persistent conclusions of
Gravity, but grandmother finally has a headstone,
And I am writing another poem trying to tattoo my
Skeleton onto this page: Wishful thinking, like trying
To mix cake in a recipe of scars and tears,
And everything else the little girls don’t know to say
For so many years, as the buses draw up in evening,
And in morning, as mosquitoes steal insignificant amounts
Of blood, and the children in their seats fight and squeal,
And one or to yet afraid hide their faces in books and

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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Those Feelings Who Let You In

Those feelings who let you in are going now,
Lighting out in that terrible fog:
The last one I can feel is the one letting me know,
Holding the door open as we wave the others goodbye:
What a foolish thing, ambition,
To want to know the avenues to your
Neck, displayed like a creature
Of the sea naked on the foaming shore
Without its dress of shells:
I liked these words I curled for you,
Because I wanted them to be my tongue
Slipping between your lips when you were not looking:
When you were talking with the other man:
I wanted to surprise you,
And let that me by occupation:
To inhabit your heart as if it were my preservation:
I, a naturalism, and your chest the habitat of my study,
But I was never so good at satire
To make you look a second time at me:
The embolden language of my parents’ rejection,

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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Hair Lip Parade

My father has an orchard
He wont let anybody see.
He loves horses in his orchard of the colors
Of the likes horses are
Never allowed to be,
And I still my father’s limes from the back of
His truck;
I break my jaw and have it wired shut along
I-95 to stave of scurvy:
I am like a color t.v., the very first time,
And we turn our broadsides around in
The venal sea
And fire off our green copper cannons to ward of
Coral snakes and selkies,
And the banshees from the bushes and the entangled
Colonnades;
And there was a person she knelt for beneath the wrought iron
Cross, like a gate strangled by ivy,
And maybe she was the first woman whose birthstone
Was opal to walk free and unadulterated through this

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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Oh Brother, Who Knows!

Brother,
She could be doing anything right now—
She could be making love,
But she’s probably serving domestic beers
To the undergraduate boys who come in
To get drunk on her.
They don’t have a chance….

Brother,
She could be doing anything right now—
She could be on her pink tricycle
Ringing her bell up and down frat row,
Trying to draw the attention of the ice-cream truck,
Because she has a craving for praline….

Brother,
She could be doing anything right now,
But who knows….
She said I shouldn’t feel this way toward her,
Or anyone, who I haven’t seen for most of a decade;

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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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In the Furrows and the Littered Ruts

We’re in Parkland, which trumps even Wellington:
The people are bigger and smile affluently: They drive around
In crashing space-ships, or they have entire China sets
For knees and joints. I swear, one can get rich off them with
Just tips: I have! I am rich enough to swoon into a blue-collar
Home, to drink domestic beer, to clown around with niggard-sure
Dwarfs with bruised lips in funny cars: I could never see me
Parents again, or serve the middle-class. How swell, to swoon
Like that, to give up on her eyes, to downcast into Chevrolets:
I loved, I loved her until the store was closed and she grasped
His crotch while looking at me; she took it out and slung it around-
It smelled like horrible perfume; it had the right of away, so long
And it bent in neither direction, but I could go away from them:
I do not need to look her in the eyes either way, to see what she
Is packing. Suited in my scars, I could go down these jaunting
Truths, if there is any salvation in my apocrypha, to sojourn
Into the jubilant cadence of clean pools and baseball diamonds
After hours in the dun and allergic mists; to rhyme the way I choose,
With my dogs howling, busting up the night. Oh so, she might say,
Looking at me either approvingly or with condescension, the foreplay

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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Mortal's Flame

I’ve had a dream of you the final summer
Of my morning’s sleep,
A denouement to the deeper aberrations which
Exeunt from the surface of my vision
Upon awakening,
The echoes of a dancer’s feet now refashioned
For the rebuttals of the courtyard. Authors
Die and wilt, and you read Stephen King in Middle-
School, though I can’t imagine you do anymore,
Or how you came to visit me and cheer up the side
Of my face when I wasn’t sleeping in David’s
Van during home room studies,
The little publications that you gave,
This journalism you gave up for
Even greater recognitions, and in my
Dream I bought you a sequined dress so petit I must
Have mistaken you for a doll, and the careening world
An exhibit in glass, but things graduate so rapidly
Even from my indecision,
Your affections gave way to wilt and dismissal,

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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Fall In Love With The Great Abstainer

How to break this form- Fall in love with the
Great abstainer, two horns; ride the riverr too tough
To cross, pillow fight angels:
I still want to skip school, receive my degree from the
Greenwood,
Procure the golden bough, become some king before
The next knife fight,
But I am blowing revelries to a dead regiment,
The seashell cavalry trundles around the hips of burying
Children,
Average in the sand out of hotel rooms; mothers tanning
Their souls back in the suns shadows,
High school heirlooms, drunken goddesses who lost their
Bloom,
Rich and muggy- Should have gone to Harvard
Trailer-park; now the pay check is nothing but the next
Rum- car payment: Girls on the boulevard rollerskate,
Ice-cream, lick their rings around tourism’s runny; it doesn’t
Pay for it. The entire park is in need of a graveyard; and
What have I done.

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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Ghosts of Those Things Now Thoughtless

I want to take you to that quieted reservoir where the
Twilight always plays its legs a across the lazing corrugations
As shadows bleed across given they pensive times, the lures
Of Florida Holly, or the bulldozed dunes; but you are busy playing
Those other sensory instruments which take off like thoughtless
Tracers after the desire of your eyes: You will not come with me on
My lonely walks, how many mountains I have summited alone,
Only to come down alone again, and bathe in that quieting dusk
Behind which the traffic passes just as insouciantly as you, without incident
Or sudden collision of unsuspecting bodies, like the required impact
Of bones framing organs and drowning blood, like I would have done with
You to seed such egos imbedded in the geometry of your movement,
You could never understand, but they would come wailing out of you,
Only to quiet, suckling on your tits, tugging out your creamy nourishments;
But you have walked away. Maybe you are moving to the Pacific, maybe
He is heavy bellied and red haired pubis and moving all upon you, his breath smelling of the food he fed you both tonight under the ambiance of a crowded, socializing restaurant. What can I say, but lie. I do not care. You’ve
Straightened your hair and look like an overweight snow white. No one should know that you are supposed to be out of the Ashkenazi forests and
Wind tunnels, except that you tell them with your jokes, and the subtle
Way you cross the street underneath the yet secular lights imbedded over
A lazy holocaust, the skin of your dead ancestors shading you, doing just

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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Waves’ Tumultuous Cavalries

Sky enamel the cross with light,
Beside the highway without a savior,
You are for the tourists now,
For little children at their games,
Use you for a May Pole, and dissolution
Your somber dress made for the
Benefits of the wayward kings,
Who with their scribes pollinated
The latest continent, and divided it
By the highways of amnesiac business:
They are going so fast now,
And the possible directions are magnified,
Where the dead have more homes
Beside the tombs of blue and gray generals.
Some one of them loved you
Before the day, and held your hand
Even before the conception’s glow
In the park’s womb beneath the canopy
Until, into this graduation of crippled thought,
You came unpublished hobbling,

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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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