POEMS INSPIRED BY A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
SONG FOR TITANIA
I play with words
for you
Titania
I play
with your name
mouthing it
getting my crude
tongue around it
until the sense of sound
is drowned to
wet echo
it disappears
but not the sound itself:
ah yes! cobbling, weaving
the shaft-shuttle
regulatory of
good industry
supply, demand,
I am artisan
who (despite
all appearances)
takes such care to
deliver
good service
whilst as I pun
my way to a
perfect entendre
I see
something there mirrored
in the
solid nature of your
rapture
enchantment of your poetry
*****
*****
GOODFELLOW
that juice
that misguides
messing with
the truth that is youth
in its
absolute
love
slurring word sounds to
fit that
shifty, narcotic
sex-dream picture
Oh
I do not hear
what I hear
do not see
what I see
my brute body far more
beast that it has ever been
your
fairy bower so
exquisitely
kindly
your words dripping with
the wonder of your
mouth, lips
parts I might
list
if I had
time to
Oh the love you have given me
too much for lifetime, enough
for one-night stand (more
might drown me)
that juice, my Queen,
so translated, brought
base to gold
great
alchemy
beyond the perfume trick
of simple chemistry
we must have bathed in
must have flowed, rolled
over our bodies
like a river
at which sight
Puck so
deeply impressed
*****
*****
AS DERRIÈRE
she has
an assignment
on A Midsummer
Night’s Dream
perhaps she might
venture in the
woods to
write it
where
again she
may or may not
notice
as in the Guillermo de Toro movie
the insects grow to the
size of fairies
give their
circumscribed hive-mind to
a confederation of not-
yet revolutionary-
minded rude mechanicals
but what of the
transformative magic of desire
will she see me
transformed, so wistfully
witty and erudite in
country matters when
in the
Queen’s bower hammocked
enslaved
to each other
until morning, when all
is restored, Dawn dispenses nonsense
again enthroned propriety
and my beauty wakes to see
the memory of her love
lies not
(as she thought)
with her
soulmate, her hero
but
far lesser being
her
puppeteer
her
man at the strings
ventriloquist
who had her speak so beautifully
with such strange, strange
beauty
(layer upon
layer uncovered in
sweet repartee
and yet, as Bottom did say, no
solid ground there
flat as
a pancake
curved
as derrière
*****
*****