Sunday, April 27, 2014

Now the King Drinks to Hamlet

Don't act as if your precious royal blood
Has been defiled. This is your family:
All princes, kings, and queens, high royalty
That goes back all the way to Noah's flood.
Relax. Don't drag our good name through the mud,
Whining what ought to be, or not to be.
You aggravate yourself: it's "me me me"
Until we're deaf. The argument's a dud.

Remember everything your mother said
About our past, her husband who is dead,
And what the man behind the arras meant.
We won't disparage what the marriage bed
Produced by way of sheer embarrassment,
But this, my boy, is simple harassment.

Friday, April 18, 2014

Always As Ludicrous As This

Were you always as ludicrous as this?
Did you examine stab wounds and just laugh?
Is all your conversation one big gaffe,
A roll call of ideas that you miss
While other people see them? Is a kiss
What you were craving, not an epitaph
Explaining why your life was torn in half,
An epigram on stone from the abyss?

Or maybe I'm projecting my own state,
My own dark soul, my own refractive heart,
Inflecting this man's scope and that man's art
With emptiness and undigested hate,
With screaming loneliness and startling fate?
No. You're ridiculous, a clown apart.

Thursday, April 03, 2014

Except

I haven't got a thing to say, except:
One, hockey is better than basketball,
Watching or playing; two, I love the fall,
As seasons go, the best; three, I have wept
At shows that were emotionally inept,
Because I'm such a sweet mark, after all;
Four, worlds are turning; five, my heart is small,
And redolent of promises unkept.

Does all this fit together neatly? No,
The world was never neat. Theory might be,
And I am flummoxed by complexity,
But multitudes constrain me, living slow
And burning out my chances. Let it snow,
And let it rain; I'm shining, finally.