WITH TITANIA

Tags

erotic, faerie, Fairy, poem, poetry, sexual symbolism, Shakespeare

WITH TITANIA

Queen Titania came to
teach me the delicacy
I would need
to devote to you

with what exquisite softness
would need to
ruffle your flowers

how to watch
the movement of
star across sky
when gauging
my speed

nothing even
slightly mechanical
when pressed up
against the window
of her delicatessen

the tastes there so
refined, so complex and
so intricate
take every delicious

moment
to acquaint myself

with feather-like touch
with exquisite sweetness

make love
night to morning in
absolute fairy
measure

almost
drowning in
dream
magic

yet perfect
learning-
curve.

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LESSON

Tags

BREXIT, Britain, British, Einstein, Ending, Intellectual, loss, philosophical, poem, poetry, Shakespeare

LESSON

it started as gut feeling
then intellectual exercise:
draw ever narrowing circles

on this same blackboard
where the dust itself
magically transposed
into telescope looking
into ever-expanding galaxy

into tiny equation
that said everything

how human being is
light might
be turned to fire

no one reads those blackboards now
the world they were portal into
simply run out of everything
except billboard idea

the change so fast
that dust so volatile

a country that has wished
the worst days upon itself
rushing towards
its gorgeous nemesis
like a meteor

let me
try the virtue of patience
staring deep into
that chalk

iconic chalk you
might
add in, your fivepence worth
wishing to caricature

once there wax Empire, for all its deep sin,
this place concentric, its thinking radial

now nothing crosses
to these shores, we have made
ourselves taboo, insufferably precious

that poet whose words they wrote in chalk:
now there was a lesson!

GOODFELLOW

Tags

A Midsummer Night's Dream, erotic, Language, poem, poetry, Shakespeare, wordplay

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

AND THISBE

Tags

A Midsummer Night's Dream, gender, poem, poetry, Shakespeare

AND THISBE

spoke to
Hippolyta,
Titania

about the play
asked them
if they would
not be
too averse
to my
reversing polarities

going South on
the rule of
patriarchy

thanks but no
thanks:

no
Theseus calling
the shots after
his victory

Bottom well on his way
to major accomplishment
with exquisite fairy
despite head
being full of
football, Brexit beefs
and pints
of warm beer

no
my Bottoma is
rough and ready
for
her magical lover
we shall
name Titanus

and Hippolytus and
Thesia

Lysandria and
Demetria
Herman and
Hallanus

no this world is
tipped upside down

the sexual fun
decidedly female

and why should it
not be so,

what a
jest this

could be
(would you
not agree)

or my name
is not
Wilhemina Shakespeare

POEMS INSPIRED BY A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Tags

A Midsummer Night's Dream, death, Dream, Humanity, love, philosophical, poem, poetry, sexual fantasy, sexual symbolism, Shakespeare, wordplay, writing

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

*****
*****

H & O

Tags

alternate history, Hamlet, Intertextual, Parallel universe, philosophical, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, Shakespeare, Twist in the tail, writing

H & O

the hear is oppressive:
no air conditioning present
in this Denmark prison

Hamlet observes
her
watches her

as she
sleeps

wonders why her
skin is so wet
cannot believe
she was
rescued from drowning

he touches her:
drops of water
slide under
his
fingers

slings and arrows
but stings too,

so many

he takes some out with a blade
some with the point of his dagger

his blood
her water

mingling
as their bodies mingled
fucked royally
gave him everything had got
a few hours previously
(hard as things
get non-
linear to give an exact timeline)

they exchanged small-talk, gossip,
sharp political analysis along
with the bodily fluids

unaware
in this light versus dark universe as
they truly
see it, there is another, so
many more Elsinores

Prince and (to-be) Princess
getting in some good Prince-Princessing

yet, who can say, my true Horatio,
what, as the stage is consumed by darkness
given wholly to sleep

what the dream
might manifest

and in that dream,
what the unconscious believes

ADAPTED

Tags

adaptations, computers, Design, metapoetic, monkeys, poem, poetry, random, randomness, Shakespeare, TV, writing

ADAPTED

a million monkeys
bashing away
with sledgehammers
on computer keyboards

you cannot knock
the work ethic: but then, suddenly,
seemingly out of nowhere
voila Viola, there it is:
the whole of Shakespeare, all
of the Folios
with scripts for sequels,
alternate endings

pilots a network
might wish to pick up (hoping
them the consumption to
be devoutly wished)

Oh in my mind’s eye I can see
these adaptations: the
good, the bad, the ugly
popcorn and pizza versions
of the original plays

our random universe did
so perfectly create

RETURN

Tags

Creation, death, Life, metapoetic, poem, poetry, Shakespeare

RETURN

there is a poet
in the cemetery
writing

as if
on cure
things

take
a dark turn

for is it not
this literary machine thing
devolved to pen
and paper

life’s deepest resistancew, death’s
finest achievement?

I mean — check out these stones: so many have poetic couplets
some of them epigraphs
no space for odes or even sonnets
still less
Iliad or Odyssey

this I muse whilst
graffiti on the chapel wall
pictures Sam Beckett tumbling
from birth to grave
signs too
that Nietzsche is back
back with braveface to live a return

Sun going down: convenient metaphor that
for how everything recycled

like these very words, some of them
(like “Caesar”, “dust”) dug out of their fertile grave
back from the worms that
we imagined owned them
still something of that a little less than
ghost attached that once
we might have given a name to and
that name Shakespeare’s

words
inadequate, not doing justice
especially to such names which
deserve not
to be dropped

so I
break that solemn wall

do you
openly address

restore with
heart and
with light

the death and life in all I have said
need your insight to connect

together to make
this accomplishment
(small small jewel being
our return)

BADLY

Tags

BREXIT, Britain, British, Hamlet, poem, poetry, satire, Shakespeare

BADLY

It will end badly
acts one and two
will crash into
act three
quantum entanglement
will happen in your popcorn
and all those Danish dead
on the marble-tiled floor at Elsinore

will rise up like zombies
hunt your sweet smoky bacon tasting meat
(no desperate defending of
any fourth wall
like Aragonsg at Helm’s Deep
to stave off that defeat).

GONE

Tags

BREXIT, Britain, British, Caliban, island, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, Prospero, satire, Shakespeare, The Tempest

GONE

no handshake (so
unsanitary!)

no
deal

let the little, little land
sink beneath the sea
(already an island
of sunk
humanity)

gone like a thing, a person
that fall overboard
plunged with determination
like a broken anchor, a massive
lead sinker
(that they all told you,
being experts, that you
absolutely needed to
catch any
kind of fish)

but the sea is dead, the ocean is dead
Their death by drowning being
absolutely contagious

drowned stage, drowned theatre, Prospero
and Caliban, drowned
absolute island
no one left to care, remember their history