Like the Japanese
Make for me inside an insouciance with your wonder,
And I will build for you with my muscles,
And these things I say which are steam engines,
And organic turbines; Do not let your eyes become instead
The blunders of the richly accessorized middle-classes,
Do not say those things which are readily understood and
Manageable, but instead ride with me to Mars,
This sort of amusement park made out of fire-axes and
Other pigments given to indigenous holidays. That is what I
Said: Make this life into an aqueduct, a prevalence of my
Scars hung with tinsel, your lips blowing the sawdust of such
Carpentry, your nails newly painted black and draped against
My cheek like the human brand of peacock; Or come with
Me to my grandmother’s grave and let us worship there like
The Japanese, let us spread origami like our bodies, into new
Shapes for Christmas, and let us not mind the way the snowflakes
Drift indefinably unique like little Chalets floating through a
Francophone space, or let us ride away from this back through
The vanished sea the mountains attend, as carefully as explorers
Approaching the epileptic fissures through the persimmon trees.
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Schoolyard's Stormy Vestiges
If it stormed again this afternoon,
I could go back to delivering pizzas-
But they’ve torn down that part of the world
Right near the University nobody knew me in.
I worked beside a cup-bearing goddess
Who I recalled from high school,
And remember getting drunk in the extinct pastures
With my boss who was already married
And reciting of her beside the ungodly apartments,
Everyone else tucked into parties for the night,
Except for the lesbians stripped naked and echoing
In the brightly scarred pool-
I could go back there again, given the opportunity:
I could go all the way back up the root of Loxahatchee,
Sleep into noon in some corrugated trailer underneath
The Australian Pine trees,
Fish in my own secret pond, take my catches to bed
With me, singing how god is the creation of man-
And when he walks out of the liquor store,
His boots made out of the last reptilian vestiges of the
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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What I Meant By Being Sincere
Let me nuzzle up to your gorgeous golf
Courses,
To the bows in your swayed esplanade:
Let me ruin endings and
Airplanes for you:
Let me talk straight out; Oh, gosh, I’d like
To say your name,
But who are you listening to now,
The baby tugging your long list of satin
Accomplishments;
I’ll just sit here and refrain as one of your hounds.
You help me put down the gun:
And I can pretend for you to be on a ride in the sea,
Each of your sisters nibbling our gunny sides,
My toned biceps scrimshawed with chorus
Lines from Tex-Arkana; say that you remember me
Now, some gumshoe out lost around the
Terrible borders of high-school,
And I’ll gallop you all the faster to the dinner of
Scallops and sweet disaster,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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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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