AT ELSINORE

Tags

love, meaning, metapoetic, philosophical, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, postmodern, poststructuralist, Reader, wordplay, writing

AT ELSINORE

I followed Schrödinger’s cat
into Elsinore
behind the arras, through
an entrance/exit door
where
to paradox the shit
out of everybody
we shared
a soliloquy

until Hamlet emerged, and
mistaking us for the players
(every Shakespeare a
Stoppard just
waiting to get rewritten)
put us
in his play

and cat and I were caught
debating whether Denmark was
a prison and
if so, might this not
be thanks to
Kierkegaard, or to
the Copenhagen School
Bohr-ing
the life out
of everybody

but cat did assure me
he had it on good authority
Ophelia was played by
Connie Nielsen, Gertrude
by Helena Christensen
which seemed to
one so queen-starved
to be
reason enough
to remain

unless
in this Möbius Escher world
binary choice is
no longer a reality, no longer
an option

the stage
being both everywhere
and nowhere

it seems, just like our Danish prince,
cat and I will be going nowhere
ours the most deadly
of all the sins

pure
overthinking of our fate.

AT ELSINORE (ACT II)

Tags

Hamlet, poem, poetry, postmodern, poststructuralist, quantum, Shakespeare, wordplay

AT ELSINORE (ACT II)

the time
was out of joint

so Schrödinger’s cat
rolled one for
the two of us
and we
smoked it

left me thinking
if I had
brought a guitar
could turn this
blank verse
into reggae

give it
some Caribbean
soul

this long
before Bob Marley
and the glorious
history of British
slavers
enriching themselves
off the suffering of
poor African folk

but we
(cat and I)
were desperate to
get into the
castle
having back-stage passes
reckoning we
could knock a
few walls down
if needs be
it being all papier-mâché

or worm our way in
disguised as grave diggers
so many
about to die
bound to
need extra labour

(cat wondering
why Osric
should be spared

asking what
–but for the
stylish extravagance
of his whiskers —
joy or
sense of
purpose
his survival might bring

BADLY

Tags

poem, poetry, Shakespeare, writing

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

DEVICE

Tags

erotic, love, poem, poetry, Shakespeare, writing

DEVICE

Thank you for making me feel
less loose,
not as diffuse

nor as tightly wound
either

just
under full sail

holding my bearings
my mast as
safe and solid

as in any other
sexy navigational metaphor
poet ever
devised.

ALL

Tags

lunatic, poem, poetry, politician, Reader, Shakespeare

ALL

give priority
to a lunatic’s
reading of Shakespeare

over any politician
who scans every
page
like a
broken
photocopier

whilst the one
who is mad
(or at
least
more eccentric
in interpretation)

bounds through the play
as if it were
through all
the plays as if
one
interconnected dream

faster than Puck, quicker
than Achilles

Athens, Venice, Rome, France,
Scotland, London

it is all
one castle, all
one forest

one vast, politician-
scouring, interconnected scene

BY JURY

Tags

History, poem, poetry, political, Reader, Shakespeare, writing

BY JURY

let’s call
Shakespeare
to explain himself

tell us why
he wrote
what he wrote
did

why he
did not stick
to the niceties

eschewed
convention

managed to
stay out of
Elizabethan,
Jacobean
prison

(maybe
greater
love of
writing in

such politically
dangerous days)

DREAMING OF NEW LANDS

Tags

Humanity, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, power, Reader, Shakespeare, wordplay

DREAMING OF NEW LANDS

trust a raving
lunatics reading
of Shakespeare

over that of any
slightly less rabid politician

as Shakespeare himself
surely sensed
a lunatic rushes through
the text by
leaps and bounds
savoring every
word where

Athens, Venice, Rome,
Verona

night
before Agincourt
or Bosworth field

he is instantly transported
faster than Puck, speedier
than Achilles
is transported hither
and thither
at breakneck speed

watching the bards bloody men
of power
escape Tyburn hill
but not assassination
not a
traitors death like
Coriolanus of Rome

or old aged complacency like Theseus
strolling the outskirts of the forest
immune to
its magic

his voice so legislative
conquered wife in tow

whilst
there being no bottom

in this capsizing of hierarchy
a man less
favored by the State
can be
if but for
a moment be blessed by the gods
or rather, mouth of
fairy woman, drugged
searching for
new experiences
opening of parameters

when it comes to
saucy, secret code of pun

we can see, hear, sweet, fat Sir John
(a Prince’s troublesome parasite)
jingling a few
coins for
Eastcheap sack

dreaming
of new lands

YOU TALK OF SHAKESPEARE

Tags

poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, Shakespeare

YOU TALK OF SHAKESPEARE

you talk of Shakespeare
as if you
know him

and you do
from flowery
pageants of history
and your coffee table
(or maybe that
is too much of an assumption)

you talk of Shakespeare
as if he were so
consonant with
your ideology
(I admit, so much
in common there,
down that
Lancastrian line

the greatest at-pain-
of-death trick
ever pulled

and true Tudor
beginning of British propaganda
those heavenly lies without
which Empire
a true miscarriage,
an abortion

no new world born
Cape to Cairo
sun
never setting
on its shade of pink)

yes
Shakespeare is
one part bedrock and
one part
shadow, pure
disavowal, anarchic subversion

he had the bravery to
flaunt before your faces
the life and energy of his characters

telling a truth you
would not believe

Mr Politician, most recent in that line
of hucksters and usurpers, connivers
and
men with daggers
in the wings

who never read
but tell us how much this work
stands test of
time but
needs to be winnowed, smoothed, protected

Oh my dear bard
you knew behind the masque, the pageant
the Royal progresses and processions

how deep the need to hold the
word, control forever

how deep the fear
for the pen
and absolute contempt

ELSINORE

Tags

Hamlet, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, Shakespeare, writing

ELSINORE

penned in by
the strictures of
impossible ideology

the wings of
his imagination
bloodied
by their cage

the play’s the thing
for greater conscience
than that of
a King

he knows, and thus
the stage that
was Elsinore
but
a moment before

littered with dead bodies
and the
bouquets of
shock and awe

with which
we leave

the mirror in which
our nature here
displayed

not quite as imagined
not quite
as expected

and yet
that Danish prison

still in our ears
on our tongues

so close to home
as is
disguised

as is
written

BRUTUS

Tags

Julius Caesar, Marc Anthony, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, Shakespeare, writing

BRUTUS

Brutus
is both
assured
and
strangely
tentative

he knows
(or senses)
that this
for all his
measured,
rational
eloquence

that this
is not
his play

as his words
leave his
mouth he
thanks the
god Apollo
for every
local
accomplishment

but wait, here
at his insistence
is the man
they should
have simply
murdered

let Rome’s bloody
political night
absorb

not to hard to
find the lie
the perfect euphemism

but he
will eventually
die too
this man who
thinks himself
Apollo
who will
sire love child after
love child with
goddess Isis
in physical shape
and form
of Queen
Cleopatra

who here resorts to
the treachery of poetry
innuendo enough
to hang
any honest man
still less
enemy
in plain
view
covered in
the blood of
a beloved tyrant.