BADLY
MacBeth
trades his bloodied armour
for a bloody clown suit
what masqueraded as his honour
(carefully cultivated media profile)
he has pawned
after the XXX exchange
with the witches
all bets are off
and once his lady let that reptile
into her brain
she could not feel
him inside her
without thinking “dagger”
and quite fortuitously but
predictably
night is here
will get blamed, will be
the black scapegoat, deemed
personification of evil
and all this just
for the moment to
take in the world on
an upward swing, from
the
high point of the seesaw
Oh this isolation, that filling the most,
this raising the drawbridge, dropping
the portcullis
filling the channel with a fog
a mist quite enchanted, yet
pea-soup thick
and those words that echo in the native langue
to be banished, excommunicated, dutifully excised
as
sometimes has been our
custom, habit so
oddly
self-defeating
absurdity begets absurdity
MacBeth begets Beckett
power is emptiness, chimera, fiction
delusion
but as these go
it is only one we have, only
one worth having
not worth
the tiny trouble of
soul damnation
not worth a damn and
yet it is
inescapable
the fiction of such a castle
the dream of the blood circus as
forever merry-
go-round
Jan Kott
reading your mad declarations in
through a sheet of ice (summation
so much
freezing history)
the factory inside, deep in
magical forest, real witch territory
now factory of terror
all the red in the signage
human blood (what
else
could they think of)
and black-death bibles whizzing through
the fatal presses
so much history to burn
both text
and flesh of it
thumb through the preface, words gathered there
red-hot for a burning
Heine
the poet telling us
the forest moving has
confined the prophecy that what leaves burn
leave clothes, spectacles, essentials,
gold in
teeth just
there for the taking
and Kurosawa’s tragic character (into
samurai world so
creatively translated)
falls
pierced by arrows
the clown
last relic of the past on stage
to underpin the philosophy of empty
hubris of man
in face of our nothingness
always
ending badly
Nietzsche’s two lovely gods
setting seal with their royal stamp