A lifetime’s unlearnings
The surprise of an expectation revealed
By its denial
The march of time
The shifting of belief
The rise and fall of hope
An absolute turn around in outlook
One organ exchanged for a machine
Eyes from one head to another
Food grown in a test tube
Pictures flickering across a screen
Talking with a friend across an ocean
The depths of feeling
The creatures in the depths of the ocean
The creatures in our bowels
The creatures who turn our bowels inside out
Fear delight
Desire pain
Despair euphoria
Author: erainbowd
But even then the morning cock crew loud, and at the sound it shrunk in haste away and vanished from our sight.
My mind must be in the gutter today
Because all I can think about
Is a morning cock crew.
I picture a team of uniformed fellows
Sent in, running, first thing in the morning
To address the needs of the cock.
Perhaps they erect it
Get it up on blocks to look under the chassis
Take it for a spin
Bring it in to the garage
To fine tune it.
The morning cock crew
Bustle about
Making light work for the crew
That comes in the evening.
Yet once methought It lifted up its head and did address Itself to motion like as it would speak.
The dance of almost speech,
The body arranging itself for words
Will be visible from a great distance
No matter how subtle.
One could not say what we see shift –
But our eyes are primed to notice the preparation for a pronouncement.
I think it is the breath, perhaps,
Swelling out the chest.
Or a kind of forward momentum
Or maybe just a slight tilt of the chin upward
A subtle cue
To muscle one’s way into silence
Or among a tumult of voices.
Those who wait their turn to speak
Will watch for this flag and wait.
Those whose pleasure it is to claim space
In conversation
Will watch it like a car on the entrance ramp of the highway
So they can speed forward before the car on the lane arrives.
The about to speak-ness broadcasts itself and is received
According to the system that reads it.
My lord, I did, But answer made it none.
Not answering is always an answer.
It’s an answer full of nothing and everything.
It’s the fullest of potential and most void of certainty.
An unanswered answer answers with silence.
Did you not speak to it?
The muse sits tied up in the corner.
She’s a bit tattered
Her feet are dirty
There are leaves in her hair.
You claim your innocence, your lack of involvement in the affair
You didn’t tie her up
You didn’t tear her clothes
You have no authority to free her
You sit
You drink tea
Read your paper
Hoping someone will arrive to free the poor girl or thing
Whatever it is.
Later, you will claim you didn’t know
You couldn’t have understood
The figure in the corner never said anything.
My lord, upon the platform where we watch.
Bang!
I remember a moment in my high school black box theatre –
Just like that.
Line; read
Imagination zooms to the past and drops
A platform on my foot
The edge of it is sharp and breaks the skin
Leaving me a jagged scar
Long faded now
But once, angry
Once, wide, and gaping.
Memory retains the black metal and wood,
The blood
The pain
The surprise
The location (downstage, in front of the seating bank)
The quality of light
The only thing I can’t recall
Is who dropped it.
But where was this?
A warm basement
A table covered in sweets –
We were strangers
Starving and lost.
We’d come to the restaurant in hopes of taming
The hunger we’d brought, first on the train, then the bus
Then the ferry and the sputtering car
From the morning to the next morning
Into this afternoon.
The family had just finished Christmas dinner
When we stumbled against their glass sliding door.
We were ready to turn on our heels and go
But they brought us in without hesitation.
They fed us all the sweetness.
They showed us card tricks
Practiced their English and laughed
At our fumbling attempts to speak their language.
If I need an image of absolute welcome
And hospitality
If I need to remember how it feels
To be grateful
To accept the generosity, kindness and grace
Of someone or something
I conjure that basement room, the yard, the world around it.
These hands are not more like.
Not like water falling over stones
Or hard shelled little creatures on their backs, kicking to the sky
These hands are not more like
A sea urchin, grasping for food
Or a heart beating
Especially not when closed into a fist
Not like a jellyfish, no.
Not like a star, drawn by a child
Not like an alligator with two sets of jaws
Or a sculpture in the sound
Not like my mother’s hand
Not like my grandmother’s
No not yet
Though soon
Soon
I knew your father.
Mr. Hamlet would pick up
Little Horatio after baseball practice.
He’d ask after his mother
Give him a juicebox
Pat him on the shoulder
When some injustice at school stained his face with tears.
Mr. Hamlet, like a second father,
Watched Horatio grow
Getting taller and shorter and taller
than his son.
When the boys came home from school
Mr. Hamlet asked after Horatio’s
Prospects, how he found his housing
How he enjoyed the weather.
Did they know each other?
Certainly.
But did Horatio know how Mr. Hamlet
Longed for a patch of land
Near his old estate?
Did he know how he
Withered a bit
Whenever his proud cousin came to town?
Did he know about that night one September
When he sat in the kitchen with his belt around his neck,
Standing on a kitchen chair wondering?
Certainly not.
But one doesn’t need to know another’s secrets
To know him, right?
The man who sells the apples on the streets is known to many.
If he were to disappear
Many a fruit eater
Would contribute to the search call for help
Mourn his absence.
Even if no one ever knew
His love for daisies,
He would be known and lost.
This to me In dreadful secrecy impart they did And I with them the third night kept the watch, Where, as they had delivered, both in time Form of the thing, each word made true and good The apparition comes.
Five lines of anticipation
For a hell of a pay-off
In line six.
Horatio picks up the thread with a bit of a story
Follows it
Carefully
Confirming each inch
As he moves along
To what could be a story all on its own.
If this last phrase
Were the first phrase
Of a novel,
A world would be opened up.
In fact, the scene which is described here
Is the opening of this world.
The coming of the apparition
Is the trigger
On the gun of this play.
The Hamlet Project 