Classsic ghost.
Your average ghost is terse like this, right?
You’re gonna get “Booooo.” Or “Guilty!” or “You did it.”
“Mark me” fits right into the ghostly repertoire
You might wonder if he has words at all after an opener like that.
Maybe death turns a person monosyllabic.
Turns out
It doesn’t.
Not for this ghost anyway –
He’s gonna head right to several three syllable five dollar words in a few seconds
But he starts as classic ghost.
I wonder, though, if Hamlet Sr. spoke like this in life, too.
Was he given to pronouncements?
He was a king, after all – and presumably for some time.
Perhaps his speech was always peppered with preparations like this.
Maybe it was a ritual with him
Before he spoke
To demand attention
That he already had.
Author: erainbowd
I’ll go no further.
Hamlet is talking to the ghost of his father.
I am talking to the ghost of my ambition.
It has risen from its tomb to chide me.
It finds me negligent in doing its will.
I try to excuse myself, to dismiss this insistent ghost –
I tell it I have gone as far as I can go,
That I have done eveything in my power
That it must make peace with what is,
That it is dead and I am where I will likely always be.
The ghost shakes its head and something stirs in me.
Its gory locks shake something loose in me
Something that wants to shoot skyward like a firework.
It’s not quite ready to blow but the ghost can see it
And it’s getting out a box of matches to light the fuse of the rocket.
Speak.
Before bed last night,
I was reading a book about the Voice.
It made me think about my own voice
About despite the fact that I get nothing but positive feedback about it,
I still would rather not speak much of the time.
Some keep quiet because they’re not enamoured of the sound
I keep quiet because – I don’t know –
I sometimes just don’t want to say anything.
There’s some internal rule about not saying anything
Unless I have something of value to say. I cannot simply fill up aural space
I’d rather listen.
Whither wilt thou lead me?
There comes a moment
After so much willingness
After surrender after surrender
After not knowing where you’re going for what feels like ages
After watching your comrades fall by the side of the road
After tripping over roots and stumbling over rocks
When you’re bruised and bleeding and can’t see so clearly anymore
After you’ve paused and taken it up again
After you’re sure this is the end
You have to stop and ask.
Nay, let’s follow him.
Horatio, reported to be the scholarly stoic, the seemingly rational,
Suggests that they trust that God will take care of this situation.
Marcellus throws that idea right under the bus.
He has thrown off any thought of following orders now
Even God’s.
So he throws all caution to the wind and proposes they charge after that which they are all afraid of.
Heaven will direct it.
A boffo blockbuster
Full of action sequences
Multiple explosions
A tragic love story
A heartwarming family subplot
Starring your big screen favorites,
Beloved by many, known by few.
It’s an old script
Reworked and remade
Multiple times -So many that no one recognizes the old form within it
And the original author is lost to history.
From the people who brought you all your favorite stories,
This new film will give you all the thrills and more.
Directed by Heaven, who’s gunning for an Oscar.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Who left that bag of onions in the back of that cupboard in the legislature? Things aren’t so pure around here as a rule but to compund it with the disintegration of vegetable matter, really goes over the rotting edge. It starts to smell; at first just tickling the nose with wafts of stink, then growing until the source of the corruption is found.
Marcellus can smell it. A ghost appears, stalks off with his son. Marcellus smells trouble. He smells the kind of trouble that won’t be solved with a removal and a fumigation. He smells trouble that starts with a bag of rotting onions but then travels through the entire cupboard filling up the house with corruption, spreading like a cancer til everything ends up dead. That won’t happen here, of course. No.
To what issue will this come?
We don’t talk about issues in the sense of being children much
I’m not sure Horatio is using issue in that way exactly but
It does seem as if the issue he is speaking of
Will be the child of the situation.
What will scream its way into the world now
Out of this union of ghost and midnight and empassioned man?
We talk about issues a lot these days
But those issues don’t usually carry the sense
Of things born from our bodies
Of things we gave birth to
That carry our dna into the future
Though, of course, they do.
Have after.
Like dessert
Or coffee
Or port
Or a cigar in the drawing room
Maybe a little chalky mint in a wrapper
Or a spoonful of liqorice seeds.
‘Tis not fit thus to obey him.
I can’t help it. I’m obsessed.
I can not stop reading and watching coverage
Of the protest events at UC Davis.
I’m thinking of it again now
Because I’m impressed with Marcellus – Who knows when to disobey an order –
And I’m thinking about the military and the militarized police
In riot gear
With guns and visors
And pepper spray – on a quiet and peaceful college lawn.
Someone gave that order and someone
Should have said it was not right to obey it.
I am curious about what triggers violence as easy as watering a lawn
(five minutes before the man sprays pepper onto a line of peaceful students sitting on the ground, the video shows him chatting with them and patting them on the back)
but I am also curious about what triggers my own interest and outrage and investment.
I have seen horrible police violence before
The bleeding foreheads from the Zuccotti park raid,
The rubber bullet welts from all over the country
The veteran in critical condition from Oakland police action,
The students jabbed with batons in Berkeley,
And I was upset
Of course I was
I looked and got upset
And then looked away again.
This time, though, I can’t look away.
I wonder if it’s because I have stood
On the very same patch of earth
That those students sat on.
I know what that air smells like
I know what the atmosphere feels like
I can vividly imaigne it all and find myself
So proud of a student body that when I was part of it, I took Zero interest in.
Now, they are fighting, now they’re in a war
They make me want to join up –
Help them challenge those that gave the orders
As well as those that ought to have disobeyed them.
The Hamlet Project 