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Best Poems Written by Brooke Wolfe

Below are the all-time best Brooke Wolfe poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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Ugliness

Lip stained ugliness
On my detrimental brow
Transcends the insignificance
Of union unbound
By tides indefinable
Even her skeleton is beautiful

Details | Brooke Wolfe Poem

Avacado, Amoretto

Silently bathed in avocado,          
you soaked in the fragrance of a blanket
At midday, crunched your teeth   
into something sweet and yellow,
no flower still no pretty petal;      
I’ll make our evening coffee, I’ll make amoretto. 

Why is it you liked amaretto             
so much? As if the melted avocados 
weren’t enough, to stare at petals       
in the dark, stained blanket                
etherized beneath a star shine yellow
Stare, as I stare at the white crevice: your teeth 

that are your smile, your teeth
that become stained with the last sip of amaretto,
stained with our silence and the color yellow.
Like the silver knife who’s blade slips through the avocado,
and I wish for more minutes in a day to sit on this blanket
And more staples in this life to puncture the heart of a petal

Its mushy translucence conveys innocence, oh petal!
How I’d much like to forget and sink, or clap, my teeth
in rage but here upon this blanket
exists no rage. Here is where we sip our amaretto
And can think of nothing but the next bite of avocado
When, failing words, failing thought, a yellow

taxicab honks distantly, barely distinguishable from the yellow
buzzing bee in my hair. Swiftly landing on a nearby petal
whose delicate arms, the juice of the avocado
gently outpours from gaps between our teeth,
lover.  Lover of the sky, lover of chocolate, and amaretto.
Lover asleep on cushioned soul of the yellow blanket

baked in brilliance from the sun, yellow blanket 
under our footsteps, under our yellow 
bodies painted in the sensuous scents of amaretto
with gum like innocence floating over any petal.
Don’t get me started that I need to brush my teeth 
When yours are green with Avocado

and leaf, like the print on the blanket, yellow like yonder petal
whose strong scent reaches the taste of my teeth, stained coffee yellow
from the over-indulgence, avocado, amaretto.

Details | Brooke Wolfe Poem

A Watched Pot Never Boils

A watched pot never boils
But this pot’s callin the kettle black
Keep watchin and it’ll burn your eyes out
It's a good start
To something I could never finish

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I Am Not Your Daughter

I am not your daughter
I will wear pink and red together
Just because they don’t match
I will dye my hair black
Not only just because you said not to 
But because I know I’m not a blonde 
At heart, like you.  Even though when my hair’s
Natural it’s blonde and when yours is natural
It’s gray.  And how bout next time you
Wanna lecture me about my weight
I give you a lecture on how your issues with control 
gave me issues with my weight in the first place.  
Now I’ll dye my hair red and it’s worth 
The criticizing glances I get from all kinds of elders
Oh she’s just going through that phase!
Because your looks are not less than or equal to but GREATER
Than any judgemental stare I get from anyone else.  
I’ll dye my hair red to un-match myself from you because
I’m not your daughter.
And I wouldn’t be prettier if I had your nose
Some people like me the way I am
So forget you and forget your husband
And maybe if you hadn’t been forgetting dad
In the first place
This premature mistake would never have been born
September 1st 1984, 2:40 am
Sorry for waking you up in the middle of the night, mom!
And sorry for having such a big head!
It was all my fault.  
None of my genes were ever yours, 
I don’t know where they came from…
Probably from hell.  
And that’s why my hair is red 
Burning with hate towards you.  
I don’t know where my head got stuck…somewhere between the napkin 
dispensers
And salt shakers, or under the linoleum where I’d gladly call it home for a few 
days 
It frightens me to write these words
And if frightens me to think of what you might think of what I’m thinking
But you’re my friend and you won’t judege, will you?
Somewhere between a rock and a resting place lies the sound system playing
Rock and roll in my ears and if you’re lucky, we’ll roll in bed
And not a rock and if yo’ure less lucky we’ll just keep climbing
In hopes to reach a height that isn’t even there.
We’ll read the manifestoes of idiots as if 
We were the only idiots who cared.  
Get out of my hair.  You hate it when I call you that?
Well all morons hate it when you call them a moron
Because you’re pointing out the obvious
And the obvious isn’t obviously so great when we’re referring to those traits. 
Now what is it that makes a poem so great?
I don’t know and I don’t care as long as it is and you stay out of my hair
And don’t touch me with your god-awful stares
Don’t feel me with your glances cuz trust me
Forget you and all you do and especially what you don’t
Cuz it’s what you don’t do that
Makes me wanna kill you.

Details | Brooke Wolfe Poem

Candlelight Night

Dark shadows are dancing
Around my bed tonight

This night’s been a mixture 
Of what is good and what seems bad

Tonight’s been transcendent 
And I’m alone in my room again.  

The glow of the lamp sprawls out across my empty desk
And creeps over the surface of the brown, fake wood,

Gradually dimming, decreasing, decaying.
Tonight’s been a night of thoughts and I’m too tired to think.

Tomorrow’s another day that will also soon go away
I’m too tired to want to play, to write, to watch tv.

Too drained and confused to see what is bothering me
The shadows and the light and the mixture of the three

Cannot be understood so easily, not at all unlike the concepts of geometry.  
Geometry came easy to me, because it made no sense.  

Let’s look at a bunch of silly shapes and mash them together.
When told to paint a picture of your abode

My classmates showed off their woodworking skills
And talent at depicting botany.

Floral motifs crowded the walls of the halls
And I’m tired of seeing all those two-eyed, closed fisted replicas.  

My abode was a series of color splotches, sometimes, often, but not always,
Fitted to a particular shape, not readily exemplifying anything that’s real.  

There’s a shadow a hundred miles stretching
Between me and concert, where I don’t want to go. 

I don’t want to celebrate or make noise.  There’s a light
A hundred miles between me and humanity

But it’s intersecting, perpendicular madness cannot benefit, only digress
There’s a hundred miles between me and something, it’s somewhere I don’t 
want to be.  

Don’t take me home and don’t sing me prayers, I can’t hear lullabies, 
Even under compassionate stares.

Details | Brooke Wolfe Poem

A Charge

There is a charge for the naming of the stars
A week long trip to mars, and a cup of creamed coffee
Alongside a crumb-filled plate.  
There is a fare, a fare, if you dare,
Take a swim in the Delaware
Take a swim in mid-winter.
There is a fate to this loneliness
If you care to see it.
There is time, time to write poems if you’ll give yourself the time,
Time to aspire to your demise,
I no longer despise thoughts of suicide,
They’ve grown to comfort me
And these words, written in solace
Beneath the black ink of the pen 
And the wet salt of my face,
Beneath many thoughts and tears that I can’t describe.
Don’t touch my shoulder, 
My shoulder doesn’t exist.  
Don’t look at my face, I am not a pretty girl. 
Look with the look of a thief, you try to steal my soul,
Give my soul back to me!  
I no longer exist!  
I exist as the beat of hummingbird’s wings and I don’t know what to say about that
Every place belongs to it a different feeling, a different charge
A large charge, a very large charge for the hearing of my fate,
Most ears are plugged to it.
They are plugged to the sound of my decline, 
They choose to hear whatever their ear finds devine,
And I fall, into the dark, unto the candlelight
Which gives me more life than a mother,
A brother, a sister, a timeless friend that I knew,
Grew with, another time
There is a time to grow a time to fall a time to decline.
It’s thanksgiving day and the afternoon and I don’t want to be hear.
I don’t mind hearing the voices from afar, its just when I see your expression 
matching with your face and I feel the meaninglessness of this place and I hear 
the uselessness
Of these sounds, they penetrate my body with a sting,
A sting so sharp it kills my social skills
And solitude has been knocking a long time now 
So I may as well heed his calls.  

Suicide has also been knocking, and I’d like to heed his calls.  
I hate the holidays, they make me so sad. 
I like to look at guns, though I hate violence.  
I like thinking about the day I will shoot myself, 
Though no one can see through me, 
No one knows I have these thoughts,
Though dangerous, that is the way that I like it.

Details | Brooke Wolfe Poem

Sestina: Green Dream

Was it only in a dream
I saw green 
Willow bright
In the pathway full of fright?
Its loneliness caught my eye
Not to be tainted by the sweet

Smell of nectar golden sweet.
Tomorrow I’ll dream 
With a glisten in my eye
Deadened with the musty green
Of nightmarish fright
Which cannot outweigh the stars bright

But can compare to the caramel brightness
Of a nutshell so sweet
It gave the small one a fright
Though he dared dream
Of bigger things green
Which outshine the eye

Of nether eye
Can collapse into a bright 
Explosion of green
Not to be confused with the sweet 
Possible dream
That turns to frighten

Quickly.  Don’t deny the fright
It’s chance to catch your eye
For beauty holds even more than found in dreams
Despite the lack of bright or things sweet
Which weld together under the green

Of grandad’s willow tree so green
Whose dark corridors gave us a fright 
when young but nothing something sweet
couldn’t cure besides a look in the eye
of the beholder of bright
miracles in a dead winter’s dream

so when something green catches your eye
don’t ignore the fright you find could turn out bright
under willows sweet even if only in dreams.

Details | Brooke Wolfe Poem

Mid July

When the clock ticks towards the end of July,
I begin spending all too-hot summer days painting the blue-jay,
A rare and almost-majestic mini, hard to find the right color paint
For.  But on good days after sunset the air becomes crisp
Enough for me to enjoy the change in temperature corresponding with my change
Of mood or palette, all-encompasses occurring under

That unfabulous shroud of melancholy, that, under
Which I cannot keep safe-keeping in July.
When the colors on the page scream for need of change,
I ignore the plight of the real blue-jay
As he exists in this reality of crisp-
Air-fragility which causes my paint

To dry and crumble like the immature cheap paint
Of a five-year old hanging just under
My incomplete summer canvas crisp
With hopes of an increasingly hopeful July.
I stroke the brushed-over blue-jay
Feathers fake on canvas which changes

With every motion of my hand, changing
The color of my paints
As I allow them to drip over the image of my blue-jay,
The reality now out of sight making reality more clearly hidden under 
The lie of a canvas in late July.
It lies hidden under remorse of lies, crisp

With not-yet-oncoming autumn crispness
Teasing me with surreality which changes
With every movement of a hand this time of July.
I methodically repetitiously move my hand to paint but what I thought was real 
was revealed as not under
The surreal thought of the canvas as the actual blue-jay

Who fluttered his meaningless blue-jay
Wings a long time ago out of sight—crisply
Seen crawling around or over, when it should’ve been under
The hammock tree in the rain, recently changed 
To my favorite willow peaceful-painting
Locale no matters the month, even July.

The time the blue-jay wants most to be changed
By the crisp stroke of a masterful painter
In the yard, under the hot sky just after mid-July.

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Nothing Good Can Come of Smoking (1)

Nothing good can come of smoking
Forgive me if I sound like a healthnut
I’ve smoked about three packs in my lifetime so far
Mostly alone, to hide my shame
And I’ve digressed to conclude that

	Nothing good can come of smoking

Forgive me if this seems rude
For me to be a smoker
I would need to smoke outside 
in hopes some fresh air would 
carry away the stench and let it flow

		up 
	up 
up

and out of my mind
but mostly out of the minds of my parents
I would need to smoke near a bathroom 
Where I could brush my teeth immediately afterwards
To prevent the rotten yellow stains
From creeping melted onto my fake white pearls
In my permanent mouth--
my only mouth
I also need to hide that smoker’s breath 
in an attempt to prevent that dreaded questioning
	have you been smoking?
	Were you hanging out at the bar?	
	Why do you reek of cigarettes?!
No matter how cleanly I act 
I wash my hands
My face
My clothes go in plastic bags on the way home
But the cigarette smell lingers
The pungence contains with it many memories--of being lost
And nightmares too--of being found.
As dreams of my mother
Re-discovering that pack wakes me up sweating 
Dripping with salty guilt of what I’ve been hiding

Nothing good can come of smoking
Not the bad breath
The anxious dreams
The green mucus
I’ve been coughing up at work
And the workers’ distant sorry stares in my direction that come with it
my paranoid thoughts tell me they know
they know i've been smoking
and they're angry 
angry at me
and angry at the world

Details | Brooke Wolfe Poem

Je Bois Du Café

Je bois du café
Chaque journée
Pour que je me réveillée
Mais cet été
Je dois gagner
Plus l’argent pour payer
Pour tout le café
Que vous voulez 
Boire. Je ne peux pas m’arrêter
Essayer de me lever
Sans un peu de mon bois préféré