Tag: Michael Brockley
Four Poems | Michael Brockley
Brunette It was the year beautiful brunettes wore their hair like elaborate midnights on top of their heads. Everyday, I stifled the urge to kiss the brunette pianist who read music with brown eyes. She taught the bankers’ wives to play piano. “Chopsticks” and “Turkey in the Straw.” I listened on a bench across the […]
Four Poems| Michael Brockley
Bob Dylan’s Harmonica Speaks Its Mind Hohner, here, you stallions and fillies. Harp’ll do too. If my voice sounds like cinders rattling off the undercarriage of a train, I spent the last fifty years sucking Chesterfield smokes and Camel breath. At least during those times when Grunt weren’t blowin’ electric on “Tangled Up in […]
Four Poems | Michael Brockley
A Blind Date with Wendy, Before “Born to Run” My sister fixed me up with Wendy over a Fourth of July weekend. The Jersey girl was finishing a special ed degree at Ball State. Kept one eye on the fast lane eastbound out of town. Said she missed the Jersey boardwalk and having a […]
Four Poems | Michael Brockley
Where Am I Poeming: A Bards on the Run Poem for K. T. You type a poem on an orange typewriter for the man who has traveled the world seeking the holy grail of boxer shorts and the secrets of the exotic bananas plotting to take over local produce stands. You make it up […]
Four Poems | Michael Brockley
Aloha Shirt Man sings Rosalita, jump over the lion while he walks his German shepherd toward Halloween. He’s trapped in a mondegreen prison where he a capellas ain’t no woman like the one-eyed Gott and all the lonely Starbucks lovers. In this detour through cities built on sausage rolls, he is born again in a […]
Four Poems | Michael Brockley
Best of Cream Linda borrowed my Best of Cream album, the one with an eggplant and a pumpkin on the cover, the same day she told me I kissed like a dish cloth. The next day she rode shotgun with a grad student who careened his corona-red Firebird through stoplights while blasting Earth, Wind, and […]
Four Poems|Michael Brockley
Aloha Shirt Noir You retired from asking kindergartners to tell you a synonym for lie. And hung your brand-new P. I. shingle over a studio above a graphic novel store on Highway 13. During your last trip to the fiftieth state, you bought a closet-full of Aloha shirts with Hawaii-5-0 badges adrift on a […]