COBBLED TOGETHER

COBBLED TOGETHER
“But if indeed you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.” Hamlet

I’m the poor poet
who cobbled this together,
Lear-like, out on
the blasted heath
no
dutiful Fool to counsel me
in respect of
fatal choices

just the usual bunch of
nouveau superiors to
scuttle past on
their way to the city

taking pains, making
every effort to
look down their noses at me.

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NO MR SHAKESPEARE

NO MR SHAKESPEARE

Yes, I am writing this
not a Kit Marlowe or
one-and-only Mr BilI Shakespeare

the wards flow
from my digital pen
inspired by…
well, I think
you know who
you are

captured here via your
impact on me (happy, benlgn,
brutally transformative)
not as self
delved into

forced to walk some boards
pretend to the Globe
speak the pentameter, divulge as soliloquy

Sent from Samsung tablet

THEIR WORD

we have to
take their word
for it

this Big Bang thing
cosmic inflation, Universe expanding

too much insight
here could
drive you mad

since where
matter and energy supposedly came from
a question that
does not make sense so
better off
not asking

the laws of physics at that point
just a bare suggestion,
tentative hypothesis

and then the
consciousness we are
not supposed to have
no reason for it, flimsiest
rationale

but what if the Universe is
a bit more mindful than
we give it credit for

right now, as wave fronts merge
and patterns are interfering

Hamlet on the
battlements thinking
just my luck to be
dragged into a tragedy
by a ghost

and this ghost being of
my father, man
who neglected me

the stars look like shards
fragments of
a primal mirror
so no
complete picture

waves crashing below, as they
will for a literary eternity at Elsinore

how he would love, how we
would love (since
he speaks so much
for us)

to slip into a pool
of blue luminescence

who cares
whether it be a boundless ocean
or barely a pond?

SONNET

I wrote you
a
sonnet
which was
short of
fourteen lines
didn’t
rhyme

or
end
up
in bed

rhyming
like a couplet

PROSPERO IN EXILE

he purports to be
Prospero

but his finger
is
so
fish-bone

has
to be
a Caliban

his claims
so fishy
(has he
even
seen, been
to the ocean

danced in the sea
where all
creatures meet?)

and those grievances
he washes and
irons for us
like a redemptive
suit of
fish-scale

how deep they go
straight to the bone
were he
not already jelly
way beyond just
cartilaginous

and if
Prospero

what of those
ripples of incest in every
untoward suggestion

what tide of
Miranda lust swells slowly
there

to crash all
tsunami like
voice from
the unconscious

whenever she
as magical, intangible,
genetically engendered princess
appears on
magical reality screen

SHAKESPEAREAN LOVERS

let us be
true Shakespearean lovers

quaint quibblers
reveling in the joy
of punning banter

in the scrabble of tight foreplay
sating need

I READ SO MUCH SHAKESPEARE

I read so much Shakespeare
the rhythm did not
so much wear off on
as become me

I rode across the stage
of life with
sublime regularity
like mounted cavalry

and,
as with Shakespeare,
kept my
life off stage
or screen
for
all my
battle scenes.

WHILST SHAKESPEARE

whilst Shakespeare
was holding up the mirror
to human nature

the deck canted
of that wandering
bark

heaved, losing its mark
upon a spoiling sea

Ms Paglia
nose from her ocean
of study like a
univesal siren

spoke the
Dionysian truth
of chaos, ecstasy
in this bard

as the words
slipped, skipped, slid, swam
switched gears

switched universes
dissolved all time
into couplet rhyme

every planet
now in trine
opposition and
(above all) conjunction

STATE OF DENMARK

STATE OF DENMARK

we just
disease
waiting to
happen

we let in
bad virus to
tweak our
DNA

fast twitch that muscle as
you strut stage Mr Nutshell

your Renaissance mind princely
infinite,
cataloging the disastrous
wonder of the
stars as
death closes in
on your words, shuts
its iron door

BARD OF RASTA

BARD of RASTA
(Upon reading that Wits University
scientists discovered cannabis
in pipes once owned
by Shakespeare)

let me not
to the fruit of your labours
admit condescension
or distraction

those learned academics of the golden rand
did peer into those pipes
with their bright instruments
found something (a whiff of something)
perhaps a little more
Jamaican than truly Jacobean

such solace not to your tragic creations
readily provided
who fall, finding nothing chemical
to lift or redeem