The Purple World
If all of a peacock was purple
It would be a star—
No cerulean or evergreen—
No place for
Mermaids to admire it—
Purple fanning underneath the sun,
Showing all of the tourists—
All of the housewives that he is
A man—maybe if they could love
Through an everyday metamorphosis,
They would wish upon him—
To feed him popcorn
And to make love to him—
The usual hijinks between the orchards
And the highways—in the singing
Prisons where they they—
But it is not possible for them to think of
Him as anything else than a peacock,
Even if all of purpled fanned—
Though he is more beautiful than them—
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Measures of Feral Elements
Pummeling, tremulous:
The sounds of fierce eloping- the tragic existence
Of all parts starving,
Eating all at once- the planes diving in opulent pristine-
While the girls are working:
And even your girlfriend melting away on a fieldtrip
From high school
Finds unexplainable reasons in the parks she fled to:
Where the bicycles lay down
And are covered by the molestations of sunlight;
But forever the constant roaring-
The graduation of bodies and their modifications up
And down the highway-
Always mobile and newly exposing
The weaknesses of their endangering presumptions:
Because there is a graveyard waiting,
Down from the bricked houses, and the tallow ignited
In the churches:
Restive, like something concluded: resolved
To lay there peacefully under the measures of feral elements;
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Goody-Goody
Swimming with the cadavers of the young,
We pledge allegiance to the flag.
We didn’t quite finish school,
But we don’t feel half-bad;
And there’s a bird that doesn’t swim,
And a girl in training wheels quite young in
The retirement home kicked back
Between the palms;
And a good friend of mine takes his paycheck
From the government,
While you come home and cook for him,
And look at him in his eyes,
Goody-goody;
And when I was in the valley listening for the waves,
Weren’t you in a dream I had,
You politely asked me if you couldn’t feed the horses;
But who cares,
You rolled away with him, and the credits rolled
Like caesuras:
I held my hand over my heart; it became that broken
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Distant Flower
I give long witness to your eyes
Looking for silence.
Where is your child underneath
The mountain- There could be so many
Ways.
I will save her, because I know what
You’re thinking,
And the bus is turning around
Having forgotten so many things.
Maybe she is in the sky, the sky beneath the
Mountain,
Your child, your daughter of so many things.
Words are spit on the window of heady
Vagrancy,
But your eyes are really wonderful,
They go so far away; they see so many things.
The night is a cryptic flower turning in its
Jewelry case,
And you forgot to know who I am in any case.
And your daughter is so far away,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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If She Wasn't Already So Far Away
Twilight drinks itself to sleep and I am
Here doing the same and yawning trying to picture the
Dusky clouds over the
Retiring golf courses and the teenage cemeteries,
And maybe it because that I am not even real
And had to sit tonight behind Romero’s house while his
Special needs nephew had his forth birthday party:
And I sat beside Alma and her mother
And her daughter:
And she wore the dress that I bought her last weekend at
The flea market underneath I-95:
And I got to do this until the man she lives with came in
And sat between us: he had fake diamonds in his ears
As big as a black man’s birds eggs:
I didn’t care: I went home and jogged so far I jaunted past
Where the drunks were fishing and into the rich man’s
Yards and still I jogged, and I jogged,
Thinking that I could still breath in the loneliest perfumes of Alma
If only she wasn’t already so far away.
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Ecstatic Truth
What bedtime stories
Will you choose for your children
To knock them back
Into the poppies to sleep,
My pretties,
To send them snoozing
From their overfed
Satanic Paradise
Caged in a middle-class house
Sequestered by a manicured
Golf-course
Locked with a gate code
The nitric oxide allaying fears
Into the briefest of
Sugar-coated comas?
Certainly not the vulgar
Hypocrisy of your
Communist youth—
That the man you first loved,
Which was I,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Beyond My Window
Beyond my window
The sky blooms in a voluminous garden
The sun attends,
And there my childhood goes wandering
In the thick forest of nebulous—
There is no time on me
And there are no scars—
Gravity is a funny thing that still spins
Like a top in the palm of my hand…..
My heart is not lost in a panting jungle
Of her red fingernails and long, curling locks,
Like chains made of unbreakable feathers,
For now she stalks me without even thinking about it,
A filmy poltergeist doing her life
Five states away near where the East Ocean breathes.
She eats its salts every day and doesn’t even think about it,
The way the world tastes inside of her….
Inside me, she is the romantic acid
Spurting through my soul, taking turns with time
And gravity to bed decay in me….
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Day Is Make Believe
The waves seem to be learning how to fly,
Or just getting up so that they can try:
Yawning like blue eggs brought to the lips,
Overeasy breakfasts of the sun-
Bicycles sunken in their breasts- the complex jewels
That kids lose while playing-
Knees scabbed by slathering kisses, like tears
That good girls give in a swimming sorority:
Blowing kisses across a sunken street where fireworks
Are swimming on holiday;
And you have to keep your head up to see the forts
Floating up in the sky: they were made to be that way,
Like smoking from the bereaving day-
And little dead angels in those halls pinwheel in the
Attractions in which they find themselves,
And laughing giddily as the soft movement is somehow
Rushed through the shallows- taking your hands up to the side of
The sun, because you are my muse- and
As I am watching you, that is how you learn to pray;
And the day is make-believe, and so am I.
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Fully Fledged Flight Attendants
In the city lies the citizens laid quiet off the ejaculating of
The exhausting angels:
Those pretty demigods that put them to work, and then
Sent them back home again,
Down into the jungles and the purple fjords of their deeply
Shadowed
Cribs: perhaps like heroes defeated by their own monsters,
The motifs of satellites nearly invisible in their rooms:
The footprints of super heroes,
The metamorphosis of Cinderella’s brooms: and they go this
Way by the byways of nocturnal rivers,
Pretending that the night blooming jasmine is the only
Thing in the neighborhood that will keep them
Intoxicated, as school comes,
And the ixora blushes and turns into full hedges
Just in the very same time that the youngest sweethearts finally
Grow up and become so leggy that they leap across the continents
Wearing the finery of the heavens on their strapless shoulders:
They are now fully fledged flight attendants.
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Swinging In Her Tomorrow
It seems to be keeping things together:
The fox in the eyes of the girl who isn't even here:
In the playground before the sea:
The only thing that is hiding all of it from her is
The manmade dune that seems to
Say, "I will protect you." Well then the sun
Smiled—and the lights came out
That had previously been selling off of the
Ferris Wheels:
This was the most beautiful joy in the world
And it wasn't even his—
And as she swam in the shallow abysses—feeling
All of a brevity that wasn't even joy—
I remembered the echoes of another's knuckles
Rasping upon the thresh holds—
And whatever joy that may have once been—
Left as if it was a clouded airplane from
Her eyes—and set off for those parts
That were barren and without swing-sets:
And whatever joy there remained, swinging in her tomorrow—
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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