Benjamin Krause

Most common moods

Most common topics

Poems

The first poems in full

Read them hereShow fewer poems

Classifieds One

Journal for sale; belonged to our grandfather. He bought it after the war, sat in front of it every day with a pen, and never wrote a word.

Classifieds Two

Looking for the woman from my dream last night. Her eyes were the Cuyahoga River, and her touch was the first drop of unfrozen rain to fall on your shoulder in the beginning of Spring.

A sound request

Friend, there are certain sounds I love at night, like the ongoing opera of the crickets, the one-note sonata of an owl in a nearby tree, or, should I be lying by the lake, the furious but curiously calming encroachment and retreat of the waves, or even the primal, contagious howls of a thousand wild adolescents at Nelson Ledges, shouting all night like lemurs, their brains too stuffed with serotonin to sleep.

But the noises your lover makes with you would not be welcome to my ears were it noon in the middle of summer, let alone midnight, then one-ten, two-thirty, three-fifteen and four. It’s impossible to sleep when her piercing moans nearly perforate my eardrum, so please let me know the next time she will be staying and I’ll gladly run off to Lake Erie for the night, or take my chances with the lemurs at the Ledges.

Learn Poems app

Pick a short Krause poem and learn it today.

Step-by-step learning, voice recordings you can share, and review reminders.

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play