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Best Poems Written by Craig Sipe

Below are the all-time best Craig Sipe poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Craig Sipe Poem

Her Wuthering Letters

You get to a point where 
you can’t read them anymore
and consider yourself a grown-up.

But it wasn’t until I was fifty-two 
that I threw them away. 

How long could they hide
in a high school brief case
next to a box of sweaters 
in the attic?

So…into the Dumpster Doodle-Doo 
they went: her Wuthering epistles, 
and my Heathcliff’s angst

Risen to the “beep beep beep” 
of a trash trawler’s chaw.

By then she was a preacher’s wife
in Pennsylvania, and I was running

Manufacturing trades for a defense 
plant in Rhode Island,
a job for which I was 
wholly unsuited

They were two new skins 
for the both of us 
only one of which
had been redeemed.

Details | Craig Sipe Poem

Zombie Love Sonnet 3

Shall I liken you to a corpse bouquet?
You are certainly ripe and more fetid.
The fond zephyrs of May waft your decay
Up the addled noses of us wretched  
Hordes famished for flesh, lurching on the moor,
And me amongst them clawing to your scent
Putrix beyond the spitty chum’s allure
Propels me well beyond routine ferment
To you, though Fate’s sickle blade shall flail
My congealed member’s once firm resolve,
And fire inflames us just shy of the pale,
Our passion will continue to devolve.
   Ever, shall she be my prime cadaver,
   O to undie again, and to have her!

Details | Craig Sipe Poem

First Love

First Love

I love you
like 
the first time
I tasted peanut butter,
the first time 
someone
scratched my back.
I love you
like my first
pull on a Winston
dizzy with awe 
that such a thing
was legal.
I love you like 
the reflex
of pain
when it
gives up
from a fall,
the unforgiving 
conscription
of physics
and biology
like 
a padlock's
combination 
right turn 
to the click
and only choice but
opening 


I am a long way down
this road of mine,
and
You may not 
recognize me now
but I am 
your own
first love
same waif
always
in your eyes.

Details | Craig Sipe Poem

Hairy Carrots

The gleaners undirt 
these profane candy morphs 

as they sift through the fields 
in springs and falls.

Apiaceous, mud beige
burrowed beasties, them

bow legged, cowboy pulps; 
others with flipped  birds

sprung up from their hairy
carrot fists, bronxing to the sun.

You would think they 
would be tough, those

mutter udders, those gangsta roots, 
but they slice nicely into sticks,

lunch box size, far sweeter 
than the common orange of their ilk,

far sweeter than their own
shrubby beards would veil.

Perhaps it’s the extra time 
under muck that honeys them up,

dirt balls matriculating, 
steeped in their element. 

On weekends at the soup kitchen, 
late May through long past Labor Day,

we pack the sweet gleaned under-chips
into sack lunches with smoked ham hero’s 

and Frito's downtown behind the Kroger 
where a sunny civil riot takes

place on Saturdays, and everyone
shows up out of their bag

to pick up the sticks, hungry stomachs, 
all blood color-red in the gut

all ready to sit their hells
down…and eat.

Details | Craig Sipe Poem

That Salad Went Right Through Me

That Salad Went Right Through Me


I've always wanted to write a poem called
“That Salad Went Right Through Me”.
And I would wager upon its best destiny:

To begin with, there is the Universal Theme--
For who has not gurgled around a conference table
at half past the last radish scrap?

Who, once stalled, has not
persistently punched the flusher
to muffle the borborygmus din?

But on a loftier note, I prefer 
to think of my paean emblazoned
in the annals of first line indexes, 
where, as one wanders lonely as a cloud 

over dactyls and tropes,
“That salad went right through me”
trots right off the page 
demanding a fervid flip to its leaf.

And future discourse plied at workshops, 
and other such rarefied privies of poesy
might thusly include:

 "Did you write a poem for the class today?"

	Yes...“That Salad Went Right Through Me”

 "Well then, you should consider the cheesecake."

Details | Craig Sipe Poem

A Certain Song

You write
a certain song

 in the moment

and walk away
from it for a life

And the song 
might have been

a love song

but when
you sing it again

much later

it’s a song about
somebody else’s

love, like
this one is,

though

in the revised 
version
the other

guy vowed

this would 
never happen.

Details | Craig Sipe Poem

Folding the Towels--A Trilogy In Haiku

I
My wife folds the towels.
She is the correct folder
as opposed to me.

                 II
I have learned many
ways of folding towels poorly
over porous years.

                III
The other folders
would not agree about much
except about me.

Details | Craig Sipe Poem

Glenna's Wedding---1975

We went to Glenna’s wedding
that late afternoon in summer, you 
and I destined next, never younger.

And there was a rigatoni buffet
and open bar soaked in Popov
and lime, and everyone 

was blessed and blasted
in swaddling polyester and chiffon 
as evening did the Hustle away--

And, it was our night after 
Glenna’s wedding 
stealing the honeymoon,

out at the cottage, until 
that fine summer’s threads
shredded off to the floor,

deep into late, warm nights
of a settling fog, much
like doubt and loss.

    We went to Glenna’s wedding
    that afternoon in summer
    never younger, 

    and there was rigatoni
    Popov, shredding threads
    settling fog...Perspective 

is a kaleidoscope 
of tumbling dreams
down the tunneled lens.

I knew the future once:
and it is this idle I have
to wonder in.

Details | Craig Sipe Poem

What Happens After

O COVID with the MO-VID, you murder bug,
Your sweet quarantine champions my gloom.
Never the buff of a handshake or hug,
Serene in the still of my fond hermit room,
Blessed detention, the liberty of walls;
And though this woe suffers me to talk
To those within these connubial halls,
Exposing my hokum, I say Fie to the Pock,
And mop my arse on duplicitous reams
Of Scotts fair ply, though I’m uncertain why
I stalk the isles in this squirreling dream
Most grateful to shop, most willing to buy

What I do not know: what this mad old bastard
Needs from his truth, and what happens after.

Details | Craig Sipe Poem

We Take Leave of Our Senses Under Tents

We get buried under tents
in cemeteries, a sensible 

insurance send off,
throwing roses into a hole. 

At parking lot carnivals in June, 
I throw rings at 

impossible duck necks, 
tommy-gunning pop-up 

rubber gangsters all for a 
shot at the giant stuffed cod

you never wanted
...under a tent.

We got married under a tent.
Guests bit into 

crisp leviathan shrimp, and 
it was raining good luck rain,

so, our tent bet against 
the weather paid off.

We were carnal 
under a forest canopy

before we met, roaring and wild, we
kept the creatures up all night; 

Your awning was sort of a tent: 
striped in red and white over 

your upscale catering truck by 
the upscale curb, 

you saw me coming
before I saw you going.

And the rain is deranged and pelting
as we gather under tents 

throwing Kroger
roses into a hole.

I see them everywhere on my way
home from work in the hot summer,

the baking tents…bold, festive stripes
ripping across the melted 

asphalt lots, hawking
all kinds of hope and fervor,

And I am raptured by their retail
evangelism, and always

come home proudly
with that leather ottoman

on sale, drastically reduced,
the one you always hated, 

the one that nearly matched 
the living room couch, and still doesn’t.

But in my own defense, my dear,
my sweet gone dear, 

I had taken leave of my senses
for a moment, under a tent.