In Nostalgia's Brutal Junk Heap
Yellow rainbows smile upside down from
Cheap liquor bottles
In those retired rodent neighborhoods where dogs
Take charge
And fleas hold circus; they are all in love with the
Gamy mermaid who takes her bath of tricks
Sometimes when right before
The ice-cream man perambulates with his cursing
Wind-chimes,
His balmy vanilla fireworks: She takes all the dimes
That would’ve been his
From the bicycles of adolescent kisses;
And then she swims away, swearing that she’ll make
It all the way to Spain,
But she never does- She just gets to Lake Worth
And then dances topless for bikers;
And I would have liked to see her before she was all spent
In a house of bruises underneath the palmettos,
Their suppliant cutlery that is peppered by cicadas-
But for these scars, they make me sad and agoraphobic
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Blue Collar Schizophrenias
If I could live forever somehow
Rectified as a psalm,
It really wouldn’t matter that all my
Best friends are dogs,
And that my latest complexions scribble worry
On my belly,
The stillbirth of my isolated karmas,
And that my poetic images are really not
Much more than blue collar
Schizophrenias:
I love you, I love you-
Isn’t that what I was supposed to sing,
To pull up next to her and rev these engines,
To put my eyes on the cherry sport of her
Jogging legs:
Her name is Erin, and sometimes there are
Storm clouds in the afternoon,
Which wet the equine bodies between the trees,
And I should have my own house sometime
Soon after July 4th,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Galleria of Nostalgic Senses
Love me when the show’s over,
When you have the rosy glow from
Walking barefoot beneath the lanky mangroves,
Teething on the saw grass, teething;
And when it rains over the service industry of
Well-calved stewardesses:
When the university is pulsing through
The young steams bowed in holy:
Love me, and put dried flowers in my book of
Blank verse,
Turn your head and cough,
Black-eyed in the shadows, put on injuries,
Dirty your nails and jog for me short-skirted
To the semi’s h*rny bl*ws-
Graduate for me in the lighthouse’s slender
Cathedrals on the land spit, spikenard
For alligators,
Defanged lions cleaning themselves in emasculated zoos
Of androgynous thunder.
Love me too in old picture books of the Holy Land,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Sun and Night
And sun, and sun, and sun, and sun,
And night, and night, and night, and night.
We get up and revolve, eat, make love:
Some of us go down to the park and swing,
Some of us cry her name in sleep-
The beauty we do all of this for,
The opposite body we do not know,
But wish to handle with devilish alacrities-
I’ve climbed a tall mountain in Colorado when
It was past my bedtime, and the little boy coming down
With his parents told me it was too late;
But I climbed it anyway, the rolling back of false summits,
To see the hidden threshold the sun runs through after her.
The plaque placed near the end by a weeping mother
For the dead skier,
The marble aspens at her shivering throat,
All the dark things which come into this world,
And are twisted up and confused, and utterly beautiful.
And she is confused, when she takes his hand and draws him to bed.
Made-up but hesitant, her legs open another time
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Witches
Nothing yet to do but to distill
My bone:
Sweaty on the concrete the young
Skeletons fart at their game,
Chewing on the soft candies of their conquest,
Out back on the basketball court of ruleless rusts
Wanting to nip their teeth on harder reservoirs:
Only freshmen in the gravities, they can see
Those swervey females about to graduate from their cleomes,
Their knowledge floating in sad bellied cloudbanks on the
Backs of woven broomsticks:
All the pretty witches awakened from their ditches,
Their long black hair, their dark swaying eyes,
Circling, circling, in their kind of spells:
The young boys can barely drive,
But they have a cherry red Super 88 Oldsmobile
Leaking fumes they fumble guffawing like loony-tunes
To the sea, to chase her down, the shadow
She left behind her moted over the waves like
The darkest complexion of a gaze inside a tent,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Further Away
I am in the right place for another glass,
And perhaps I will never write another poem tonight,
As today I have to explain to Antonio that there is no more
Work right now, for the horses are hungry
And eating up all the money garnered from our patriotism;
And soon it will all be gone, and they will still be hungry
And young and growing,
And the liquor in their legs spent in the egotisms of the racetrack
And the little men atop them like unified Napoleons,
And I will still not know her number, or the saccharine rhyme of
Her heart;
For I would like to take her to the zoo,
And notify her to each of the carnivores’ appetites,
And run against her like the bachelor otter in the falsified
Eddies of his plastered architecture,
The way higher mammals purr, and tell her now that this
Is how it should be, if she could remember,
The food I feed to her, the milk like fine liquor I take from her
Breast as I steal from our children-
But she is just the rhythmical fantasy stolen by the Indians
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Mother....
I am nothing, nothing,
And the bloom is broken.....
She has forgotten to check the locks,
And the monster is loose....
I am no more,
As he takes her with his will....
I am no more,
As my mother told me
The publisher was a lie,
An easy meal for the tiger,
The fanged stranger jumping on the shore....
Maybe it would be easier as a homosexual,
And more translucent as a nun;
The trouble-free men take her in the space
Of commercials,
Taste her like an effortless meal....
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Moon's Admirer
Who can say where the weather goes
When it leaves this house, it jumps over
The rafters: an octogenarian,
An old hurdler,
Who has practiced all his existence
To touch the glowing belly of the lonely
Satellite:
The woman he saw casting her eyes
Through his window
While he was a teenager.
Then, young and eager, he still prayed
And faithfully competed for her,
And thought that by graduation she
Would know him,
And the secret roads he ran on through,
Where, between the interludes of clouds,
She cast her light down like scattered seeds
To feed the exhausted birds
Famished from trying to swallow her
Opulence to feed their young,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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I Still Want To Go Down On You, ...., Oh Well
What wonderfully warm suppliant:
Now that I am drunk, and probably shouldn’t
Be writing anything. Yes, I should shut up,
And look at pictures of you, down the well
Of high school, with your tawny legs,
Shaved and brown like the elbows of trees;
But, as you can see, I am writing anyways,
Even if you or anyone else is reading this.
If you do, it will make me laugh, now that everything
Is thoroughly maudlin: I am neither as ugly as I
Fear, nor as handsome as your drunken expectations
Might have hopes. I am drunk, and it is Halloween,
And I am thirty; and I am published, by the great
Philanthropic arm of the queen’s navy, and undoubtedly
You are making lovely eyes with your patrons, or
Whoever you are with. I love you, and I thought
About writing you and telling you that, but
I am not as stupid as you might hope, nor am I
Emily Dickenson holding to the arm of her newly
Procured husband as they are floating down the Nile,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Oh So Sad and Clever Boy
I.
I’m not very smart, so for you
I have to be clever,
I can be a dolphin clapping in the surf,
You play coy and feed me pregnant tuna
Barefoot in the amber sands;
Up to your exposed knees-
A whole bucketful will slow me down,
And distinguish a gunmetal sleuth in the sunset.
I can be a boy again mind numbed on vodka;
I can set off a quarter stick of dynamite in the
Ruby courtyard, crack open the geode,
and draw your attention,
Smile bare-chested and pick a wild pomegranate,
Juxtapose it near the stigmata of my navel
Or I can play checkers on the green geometry of
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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