"A corpse prefers
romantic weather."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Heist
Girls wear nightclothes and sometimes sleep
in liquid form, en route. Black baby grand.
Tart, blue-blind, plum-like fruit of the sloe,
she missed her second fitting. Were it not so.
Key, where she said it was, as per
speculation leaked to rival. Car waiting.
Though she may wander from her own kind.
Beuys calls from Hamburg. Evening. Light dying.
Swiss plates & papers missing--fuckwad--two days
to go, car trapped inside Germany. Back under
Mistress A. Prophetic dream, according to the place.
The thief must know me. Descend on Baltic port
for mezzotint. Some trick to it. Try giving it
away on the streets. Must make night ferry.
_______________________________________________________________ Sugar Gear
What death wants,
that too, forgetting much in tea’s desire,
in friendship hiding sorrow,
tattles under morphine,
farming the lunatic
and the light between.
What Death wants
--without guessing again--
survives the surly dawn
bearded with lace:
a thing in the limelight
the neighboring clock tells me.
You unmuzzled is too.
Man mocked by flowers
and one last
snag: strange rescue, real lilacs
sewn to my body.
The dead wake over the hull.
Not now, but now,
a visitor finds you
pulling your nightshirt
through your hands
like a frightened magician:
oh what was it was your father after?
And it, the brooding whirr
of it, spreads over the living body,
the mouth first, its native color,
those arms I always wanted,
hard as hickory.
You tasted love with half a mind.
Hybrid of petal and hoof,
black anger
every word now swallows,
tickle and burn. A corpse prefers
romantic weather.
Cassandra speaks and no one listens.
Winter rocket, fiddle dock,
succumbs to itself in flight.
One of you holds my breath:
the engine chokes and rattles, it
stalls in thirty thousand feet of air,
unawakened, sovereign.
What Death wants
it yields: a meteor, a silhouette,
the style of immortality.
Oh, there’s more to know,
or more to come.
And it will have your eyes.
What Death wants
a treble dark confides:
a puzzle in the trade,
not prey but icons
speaking to a fool
through the candle hedge.
_______________________________________________________________