Snow--White Snow--Snow White--
comes down in silent CD-ROM, soundbite,

E-Mail, and Generation X of flaky terms
I do not know. I liked her more in arms

of sweet, saltless Mother's butter,
than unique as breakfast cereal platter

of milky dawn, iced cake of car, Neutrasweet
of unpenetrated virgin counterpane of street.

She danced the dwarves of seven adjectives,
symbolically defining all our lives.

Now, she belongs, this night, to all
the world, sugared bran of the impersonal,

sustaining appetite of fear--the black
of morning that may never come awake;

the dance in tatters; songs nattering to nonsense
without rhyme or reason of Disneying heights, whence

came ever happy endings over sooty cuticles of witch.
Piling up, this midnight, is the silent switch

to granulated lingo, tag-ends of doublespeak
of language over landscape of questionable peak

and hillock, on which we fatally slip,
in which we eventually sink. Words ellipse

snatches of subconscious songs we sang
or hummed, remembered lovingly in lost kinderling.

Snow White is cartooned in particles
of what she never was--the frigid stills

of previews of pre-dawn, wherein we shiver, freeze
to neutralities, white deaths, reel-ending skies.