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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

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

Wild Eye Wise

***

Nobody loved like they did 
those nights splayed
like open books, 

soggy foils at humid peace, 
at least until the next 
morning riot.

***

I ran to the coffee shop 
last street down,
shouting your name 

to a third person, 
wearing your face
under the lamplight,

flickering over like a newsreel   
from the next day, with 
a breaking story.

***

It cracks like a stiff spine 
making it difficult 
to turn the page, like us 

ing in the morning 
roar of crow song threshing 
in the birches; 

then running buckets under 
the ceiling spigots at night
all reason disavowed.

***
 
All reason is tuned 
to divining rods
searching for water
searching for the cardinal 
heart beneath the ribs
flipping its bird truth 

at the bathroom mirror, 
in that quick space between 
sticking it out, or cutting bait.

***

Our cracked spines are chapped 
palms, pocked open hymnals 
bleating profanely 

the dissonance 
that is in our key, 
the twelve-tone psalm

they hallow, as they learn the 
liturgy of its respiration:
its own dodecaphonic Ode to Joy.

***
 
Two fated deer, supping 
out tonight amongst 
the thorny thorns

stretch their necks brink-over
a steep cove’s edge,
and a brittle rocky drop, 

stretching out for the sweetest 
berries only; come the long
rut way through the woody woods

only to stare at themselves
square-wise, astonished survivors,
wild eye to wild eye wise.

Details | Craig Sipe Poem

Til the World Ends--Three Dog Night 1975

Surfing You Tube, I come upon 
“Til The World Ends” by

Three Dog Night. It was a lesser 
hit of theirs from 1975, but

it always reminded me of you, 
and that time we were
 
going to up to Lake Erie
between semesters. 

I’d squandered my summer steel 
mill cash on Black Russians,

and was nebulous about the trip
in a nimbus way. So, when you asked 

me if it was about the money, 
that night on my grandfather’s 

front porch swing
---of course, it wasn’t---

So, we went to Lake Erie 
for the time of our untold lives.

I can evoke “The Return of the Pink
Panther”, a yellow hair dryer,

and waking up from a particular nap. 

But, given our model of 
discourse, it is not 

surprising that we didn’t
attain the   apocryphal	    It

--despite our subsequent 
engagement—

And that’s because life
is a business,

and we were a lemonade stand.

All of which is a cul de sac
looping back to those 

three dog nights, which is an Eskimo 
expression, some say, long before 

Eli’s Coming, and Joy to the World,
referring to those coldest of nights 

when it took three dogs on the bed to keep
us...and them... from freezing--- 

Symbiosis---to employ a more scientific
term where poetry doesn’t apply anymore.

“Til the World Ends” cracked the
Top 40 to number 32, the Dog’s

last hop upon the mattress. But 
those soaring falsetto peals 

on the fade out....Oh yes, that’s it.

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

Christmas Vacation

I remember watching that movie 
with you the year we separated

It was just released on VHS  
and for some God Forsaken reason

we rented it together 
on Christmas Eve at your place

You had come upon this crown molded 
apartment in an antique house

I leased a Formica townhouse thirty miles 
or so down the road

Neither one of us wanted to be alone
so we got together out of some

pragmatic separation etiquette
on Christmas Eve.

That flick is really funny
a classic contemporary distraction

that continues to un-clot future strokes 
so you can eat more turkey skin.

I liked the part when Cousin Eddy emptied 
the RV ter into the storm sewer

You liked the part when it ended, and Jesus
when it ended, I choked up over the credits

while you were in the kitchen asking 
if me if I wanted another beer,

which I didn’t…and usually do.

Did you know that Christmas Vacation
didn’t have a soundtrack of its own

even with all the classic tunes 
and the great original title number

Which I always recall with
the credits closing that night
for some God-Forsaken reason 

So now I’ve said “God Forsaken” twice
No   three times    in one poem

even though I’m an Agnostic now
with very little saint left in my nick 

Fa La La La La and Ho Ho Ho
Jingle jangle jingle as we go
Let the spirit of the season
Carry us away…..

The static fuzz flashed us by that night as we
contemplated sleeping together
which we didn’t.

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.