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Craig Sipe Poem
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.
Copyright © Craig Sipe | Year Posted 2020
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Craig Sipe Poem
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!
Copyright © Craig Sipe | Year Posted 2020
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Craig Sipe Poem
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.
Copyright © Craig Sipe | Year Posted 2022
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Craig Sipe Poem
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."
Copyright © Craig Sipe | Year Posted 2023
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Craig Sipe Poem
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.
Copyright © Craig Sipe | Year Posted 2020
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Craig Sipe Poem
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.
Copyright © Craig Sipe | Year Posted 2020
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Craig Sipe Poem
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.
Copyright © Craig Sipe | Year Posted 2023
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Craig Sipe Poem
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.
Copyright © Craig Sipe | Year Posted 2022
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Craig Sipe Poem
***
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.
Copyright © Craig Sipe | Year Posted 2020
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Craig Sipe Poem
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 **** 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.
Copyright © Craig Sipe | Year Posted 2021
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