copyright 2002 Doug Robinson


 

 

 

Sleeping Beauty, IVRC, July 15, 2002

S.B.'s a beauty, certainly, at least in this light,
her freckled rough-cropped chins hanging upside-down
like wattles from her slender white turkey neck
lying flopped up against his hairy gap-gowned belly

(only an unloving eye could call this ugly)

and she does sleep, fitfully,
singing and twitching through drugged dreams,
Wicked Witch's spinning-needle prick
not quite mighty enough magic to subdue her,
to quell her restless imaginings for those four long hours

(or is it years, decades, centuries?)

while Prince Charming hacks down through
the forests of white knuckly briars that choke
her occluded boudoir, her dark swimmers' gym,
thirty-three years thumbed now by thorns
that fall to his knife flash-flash
in the castle's reflected light
as the Prince leans in close now for
one
last
sharp
microscopic kiss.

 

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