"The bull of heaven crumbles."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
The Monotonous Sublime
War is a box of silk & dogs tipped, half-buried
In so many small horrors.
Paratroopers descend on the maroon of desert.
Dust storms spike an ocean of sand,
Heave & upwell, dip & pool
Scratched & scraped by a patient lithographer,
Everything imagined backward.
The horizon showing is too much brain
Showing, too much edge denuded of guilt.
It is erased, smoked out.
The bridge, too tall & although beautiful, weak,
Falls into a great river
Of god, an ancient crawl of damage & repose.
The hoof of a sphinx
Remains, an image of waiting.
The bull of heaven crumbles.
War lies like a psychopath, a gymnasium
Of sin, deanimalized & precise,
Working clock-like, seconds counted down to nothing --
Which is why we chose it.
_______________________________________________________________ Fairy Queen
The glamour is not entirely working,
Sticks of straw beneath my gown,
Hag lines spider out from the corners
Of my extravagantly painted eyes,
Still, I have courage.
The poet & I have differences,
She says her religion is velvet,
I say my mother was a horse,
It's the difference between covering the body
Beautifully. And being the body,
Mute & sweaty
In the long last heave of homestretch.
Still, the pen finds its way to my hand,
The white page fills with the ruins of my story,
The Girl With No Mother,
How does it go?
_______________________________________________________________