Bret R. Crabrooke (04/10/1978 / Berrien Springs)

Sky enamel the cross with light,
Beside the highway without a savior,
You are for the tourists now,
For little children at their games,
Use you for a May Pole, and dissolution
Your somber dress made for the
Benefits of the wayward kings,
Who with their scribes pollinated
The latest continent, and divided it
By the highways of amnesiac business:
They are going so fast now,
And the possible directions are magnified,
Where the dead have more homes
Beside the tombs of blue and gray generals.
Some one of them loved you
Before the day, and held your hand
Even before the conception’s glow
In the park’s womb beneath the canopy
Until, into this graduation of crippled thought,
You came unpublished hobbling,
The wasted ink staining the thumb,
A transcendental birthmark meant
To signify the deity in her legs’ crime,
Instead, left in the manicured lawn unclaimed
In between the ants’ parade and
The tourists’ picnic, the narcolepsy
Of a priest’s vibrations adjacent to
The ocean’s moaning choir boys, the waves the spasms,
Edifying only the builder’s illusion,
The mosquito’s needs inside the skin,
The magnificent cross upon the wharf,
The pestle of apocryphal slang,
Unjustified alongside the numbered route,
Where people pass into the sinkhole’s memory,
The mortar of the insatiable pseudopygrapha
And dead girls, ungraduated, perpetually
March about in the darkness, concentrically garlanding
That stemming phallus with unjustified needs,
The garments of their sisterhood’s virginal fluidities,
Fitting upon the hymen’s stone as hands cup breasts,
As attentive ears drink the beatific noise once
Meaningfully put in the unrecorded day,
The letter carriers upon the tide, bathing
In the calm between the waves’ tumultuous cavalries.