Like School Kids Skipping Away To Nothing In Particular
Cannibals slum as rain streaks the windows
Before el arco iris,
And I have seen her turning to me like a beautiful
Ship made out of the lumber of trees
That don’t grow anymore
Except for in the rhapsodies of her eyes:
There they grow and captivate little school hood boys,
As the airplanes dye cast from precious metals allotted
From the school boxes of our young truancies
Build a tiara for her sainthood;
And she yawns as foreplay and shows her teeth,
Her incisors imbedded before her smile like the sharp
Moon kindling for the wolf;
And the firemen come out to greet her and lay down
With the dragons after the busy work day is over
And the wind is picking up around our little house
The same way it does for school buses;
And the mariposas dance and sing in her throat as if they
Were teenagers somehow enjoying a ballet,
And she lets them there, and purrs like a mountain lion
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Like School Kids Skipping Away To Nothing In Particulare
Cannibals slum as rain streaks the windows
Before el arco iris,
And I have seen her turning to me like a beautiful
Ship made out of the lumber of trees
That don’t grow anymore
Except for in the rhapsodies of her eyes:
There they grow and captivate little school hood boys,
As the airplanes dye cast from precious metals allotted
From the school boxes of our young truancies
Build a tiara for her sainthood;
And she yawns as foreplay and shows her teeth,
Her incisors imbedded before her smile like the sharp
Moon kindling for the wolf;
And the firemen come out to greet her and lay down
With the dragons after the busy work day is over
And the wind is picking up around our little house
The same way it does for school buses;
And the mariposas dance and sing in her throat as if they
Were teenagers somehow enjoying a ballet,
And she lets them there, and purrs like a mountain lion
[...] Read more
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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With Your Undying Forgetfulness
Temples burn from free liquor,
The mosquitoes say nothing while they drink
My legs,
While the cicadas say so much but do nothing,
And somewhere around here there is
A snake as tiny and ringed as a ribbon in your
Indecisive hair;
And it can do just as much to me,
And quite as easily as your insouciant decisions;
If I want to press it to my sweating hinges,
If I want to caress it to the nest of purple veins,
And offer up the delectable avenues and
Choice thoroughfares to the star fruit tree tremulous
With the self-inflicting light of my soul:
This coral snake as tender as the most unnoticed wanderer
Through the weeds and wild crèches,
Like your sightless wanton kisses can do to me,
Lay me akimbo in the crime scene awaiting recognition,
The suicide of a unsparing cat
Who has no choice but to like the way the poison purrs
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Real Work Begins
I enjoy the irony of not being taken out to dinner,
For writing bad poetry, and getting
Away with it: And when the leggy substitute drops
Like a bombshell into the room, to watch movies
For the rest of the period,
And notice the canopy of her interior skeleton
Heave like a buxomy pink tarp as she sits at
The head of the class, inhaling, flickering her temporary
Eyes over the rows of boys.
They lick their lips like suburban wolves as she
Crosses her legs and her long-distance calves
Flex: She exhales and it smells like rum, from
What the pirates have done to her:
I don’t care, I still want her, and contemplate
Asking her to prom, or abducting her on the way
Out to her car, and thank god this isn’t math, or
I wouldn’t know what to do; but now I have a plan,
And I doodle a map on the desk, which spills like
A silkworm’s womb onto my hand, a pubescent jig-saw
The Mexican lady will wipe clean over night,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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What You Have Pretended To Save
Kiss me on either side of my face,
If you are from Seville
And it is your whim: Play your radio and
Back off,
As old men drive away back through the
Perfidy of their adolescence:
Think of the time you spent mocking me in
High school,
The cumulostratus or whatever you call
The flying holocaust it put me through:
Build up and pull over and make love at the
Anonymous road stop underneath the
Great stone bridges where the Indians died
Or at least gave way,
Because you are the greatly educated:
So proud of yourself and your football teams.
Your bedroom is full of red and blue ribbons,
Either coming or going away,
But it is just a very thin wall, thankless,
Persuaded,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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In Each Lock of Your Hair
I love the way your hair curls through
The ribbons and the gold;
It seems to me the laughter of children prancing
Around a Maypole,
With the hair-suited creatures out and pullulating:
This is something sincerely pagan-
It really doesn’t exist anymore,
And I try and mouth it to the briny star,
But the traffic roars and pulls
Filled with things too fast to care,
True and modern gods to plush and placate to,
But it exists in your hair in this time,
The cheerless castles and their wan girls,
Their grotto’s water-dragon’s aquatic swirls, the spume of
Fairies in the waves
Make invisible phosphorescent too ephemeral
To be proved,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Mulatto Children
How loudly the quietus barks,
Diana: Liquored up, lighting up the woods,
Our four legged body decorated by
Penumbra-
So far away the holocaust lamps of another sea,
These words I use,
Young goddess, one breasted, leaping at the
Form,
Airplanes bowing beneath her:
I see her sometimes as I am coming out of the gym,
Or when I am vacationing onto the
West part of Florida.
Archaeologists are gathering around her like kids
In daycare,
Undressing her splendiferous hip,
Speculating,
Speculating: Luscious bride of all the colors and
Elements,
Sometimes water and sometimes greening wood;
And now the cars are passing, streams of little girls:
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Common Courtesy
What does my heart feel like now;
But it feels like a long poem wanting more the
Poisons of my muses of putrescent Janus;
Looking both ways from the doorways of these
Awful purple valves,
While there are little keyholes of vision,
Then the crickets and golf balls, and the wickedness
Of water-breathing reptiles in the tall grasses of
Head-shaven cannibals:
I awakened this day of my third decade and asked a
Girl out for the first time,
And she said she couldn’t because she said she was
Not mine;
I asked a girl out for the first and for the last time,
And the candles melted under the pillow of unanswered
Virgins,
And I slouched off to the sea alone in my diesel truck
With the amphibian airplanes leaping above the ankles of
These almost vanished Titans;
And I thought of my muses, but paid to be laid by a little
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Wishing That It Had Never Happened
The fine young make-believes have already started
Shooting in:
From the gated communities of Parkland they’ve
Drifted,
And young Italian girls take photographs of each other,
And I take photographs of them:
They are venal and cottage cheese-
They will go to college, or they’ll do as they please:
Like you, they might make love to me,
If they have to, but they will never fantasies over
These estuaries as I have had to:
How I’ve tried to compare you to the muses of
Baudelaire, the two strangers made sisters by his
Pervasive charges,
The sick muse and the venal muse: I didn’t remember
That before you used to play soccer together,
But who as really in charge;
And if you’d won the season for our white tributary,
What then would have stopped your taught calved
Sorority from kissing under the bleachers,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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I Still Keep For You
I remain on our corner,
Where the moon is hung as you left it,
Where the light pools down as if on
A stage, turning the neighborhood blue
With the somber possibility;
I am still here,
Holding my gift for you,
My eyes beholding the last image of
You, how you moved like an ibex
Grazing with beautiful legs
Across our teenage suburbia
How your attention lit upon me
For no more than two weeks and
We made loving play on those old hunting
Grounds of Latin class, before new
Men startled you into their forests
Where kings saw you bathe with the
Dryad Galaphile, in the emerald tinctures
Where your legs scissor with the sadness
Of crocodiles
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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