Suicidal Munchkin
Watching the Wizard of Oz,
I dream of Tyco Brahe’s nose, and serious
Fights between scientists and their
Dwarfs;
And map paintings of stars and their hills;
And sadly, ever so sadly,
Erin- of dryads who have no love for mortal men:
Her busts are a ballad of a perfectly nippled
Power plant;
Her perfume the rich streams of auburn kelp
The gold fish show off through until they
Are scooped out and made for prizes
Of redneck lovers at the fair;
But she does not need to worry, because I am
Too uneasy for Occam’s Razor, Erin:
For easy love:
I am not beautiful Erin, and whoever you are loving
Right now,
It is a better love than I could return to you, if
My face was a mirror for your vanity-
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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From High School
Don’t you feel that we really belong because
There are windmills in your eyes
Darker than for your mother’s sadness when she goes
Away into the loneliness in her kitchen:
And there doesn’t have to be any more reason for these
Tattoos except that I went away to Spain so many odd years
Ago:
I barely graduated high school: a truant with a purple
And silver jaw who is no longer beautiful-
Lost so long ago: kidnapped by the long extinctions of fireworks:
Each peeling whistle strangely reminiscent of our lives together,
Until collected under another school bus, I have nothing
Else to do but to listen to the long day as it rains
In fake knives- and my Muse named Alma turns in,
Frowning over my misuse of the queens language and all of
My scars, scarred like a spearing pylon
Presumptuous in the bay that the terrapins circle, with jokes
And farts, as she bites her fingernails,
And the green cannons bask in the seashells of the afternoon sky:
It might as well be Easter with the beauty resurrected there:
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Peter Redgrove
While I am here another poem,
A crapshoot at eternity, a roll of dice,
I carve my name into the auburn sky:
This is my tourism, my saccharine hobby,
Like an infant masturbating, the pseudepigripha
In full bloom, she wished to take me by
The hand to the football game where the
Fantasy of her lovers waited toothily,
But I hid away in the rain and recorded the sounds
Of under aged ghosts pattering on the infinite
Linoleums of suburbia. Should I go back to
School to stem the tide of fading away?
Or should I just walk to the east until I
Begin swimming, this is the dilemma, and the reason why
I cannot meet her gaze. I remember the first
Time she showed me her c&nt unshaven in the
High school of her incensed bedroom, and the
Waves of another feeling, the fieldtrips of
Presupposed sex: we share the same birthday,
But now she is married to the tribe of her own flesh,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Our Eager Young Possibilities
Kelly wrote a poem to her mother I did not
Read;
But at night I guess I ejaculate the same way,
But to the girl and her friends,
The little fat roses I am too afraid to give away
In the immense daylight of our
Cages;
The way grizzly bears may stop and sniff before
A cerulean tent way deep in the permafrost
Of its alluvial planes, before
It gets down to its businesses of dismembering;
And I don’t love Kelly,
Not in the way I used to, the way a young child
Expects and loves his crackerjack prizes,
Even though they are not enough;
But I suppose I could- She is a beautiful woman
Who can spot dolphins and manatees just as
They go about licking the world,
Metamorphosing practically out on the surface world,
Like adolescents unsure of their graduation;
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Poltergeist Biding Its Time
Boats of a long-lipped scar:
I play the housemaid of a truant, I don’t get too far:
When I was a ghost, I made it all the way
To Spain,
But when I died as ghost, living I came back home
Again;
And the city, and the village grew with invention,
And you could hear what they were making all night through
The swift toed streets.
They made those too, and the university, and the halogens
Over the soccer filled stamped with cleats;
And I loved a girl there,
I suppose:
I loved a girl there from the rose bushes no body
Knows;
But I had already died there.
I had already been eaten by the swifter avenues of the petty
Men-
The petty men who got her first and afterwards she wouldn’t
Let me in;
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Flying Monkeys
I’m calling on you because I’m a wreck,
And I used to dream of becoming a professor when I
Jogged around the junked golf course
By the side of deep twilight, and the paltry swathed condominiums:
To tell you the truth, I haven’t loved too many women-
Mostly, I’ve been able to count them on two hands
And you rank right up there,
But now my legs are cold from drinking cheap rum:
Can you love a man without any fashion sense
Or social position?
A man terribly wounded in the dark of a fraternity’s
Pick-up truck, so he doesn’t even know where he’s
Hurt, but he just remembers you sometime in
North Central Florida before Halloween in that Asian
Restaurant joint now demolished on 13th street;
What the F-, now it flows- now it flows- I don’t
Yet have a bicycle or a home on an island, but give it time:
And the girl I neglected by dreaming of you has a new
House and better ways to make her living;
And this is not good, and now I don’t care to teach anything
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Muted Creche
Florida is returning to the way she looked
Just before the sixteenth century,
The conquistadors swimming in their bloody
Bouquets and hang-over hard-ons:
All the lost tribes are showing their faces as
The hybrids of our new species:
Guatemalans and Cubans and Haitians and
Columbians,
Swimming up stream and making love like
A kaleidoscope lost in a
Sweaty, irrational poem: What would be a
Disaster from the white man and his college
Professor,
Except for the fact that these women are beautiful,
And the bring over priced lunch,
All the roundnesses of their body like ripe
Fruit,
Like the clichés of a lunch basket passed between
Business partners;
And they all have exquisite names with three or
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Innocence's Byway
How innocence wanders the innocuous highway,
How, bearded, he dreams of the thigh he’s
Never touched,
As he sleeps in the weeds like a disposed general
Of a hungry army without any shoes,
Believing in his forthcoming victories, and preserving
How he might end up at her, and take her
By the hand, and by the subtle dissolutions of
Armistice, become sort of a Disney movie with her
Belly distended like a parade balloon,
Little children in a line and hung around the
Doublewide trailer at the mouth of the babysitting
Swamp,
The humid dulcets of the arachnid menageries,
The spider webs breathing in the corners of green rafters,
The nameless dogs chewing on the knobs of corn,
As the light flows like wet paint down the overgrown
Pines and deciduous hardwoods,
Where death is an old creeper who has yet to contain
The shoots of red, or the discarded exoskeletons spiked
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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This Lighthearted Responsibility
I smell the clefts of books in place if finding the
Face of Wallace Stevens.
And I would otherwise want to be anywhere, enlightened,
Stretched out like a cherry and golden worm:
Sure we can all graduate from the enlightened point of state college,
But how can we still touch ourselves while the paint is still
Drying;
And now I have a scar on my temple that will soon disappear,
While you are still speaking uneasily to yourself;
And all the pretty girls grow like hedges, let them grow untamed and
Feral; and they will grow just like Constantine’s balloons,
While I keep the high grade liquor between my legs,
And they keep publishing things that they cannot know, while all of their
Problems grow and grow; and their problems keep on getting multiplied,
While of their cities can find themselves trapped inside in slow
Motion, galloping on their ponies like the private séances
Of the waves and hibiscus; while the water moccasins prance,
And all of the stolen bicycles are stolen into the trances of watery bridges;
And the teal-high mothers don’t have any other words for it other than that
They are all spent on the trail head and that they are all but ready to become
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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How Many Legs I'll Have To Lose
You’ve combed your hair again and I am drinking wine
I bought tonight after I left you at that party in wounded
And high weeded guts of
West Palm Beach: the grapes are from the grandes bodegas
Where the poets rest in the trenches of lime,
And I jogged today after I left you Alma over the waters and
Into the soft terrain of the rich man’s homes,
And they made me smile and think of you, because you are
So beautiful that you could fit into any of those homes and
Make them smaller;
And how you’ve cast your eyes out of buses traveling far
And to the east;
And how you’ve never seen the Wizard of Oz, and I never
Want to have to fire you:
I feel like a torch in a warm dungeon full of booby traps when
I am nearer you:
I feel like a teenager slipping away from school to bask in his
Pastimes of cemeteries which border the teal tennis courts
Where the topless din mothers and their professional sisters play
At ease in their early retirement:
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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