Put me in a canning jar
Boil me in a pot
I am no longer the bright succulent fruit
Hanging from the vine
Fear has reduced me
Like heat and a sugar solution
To my very essence –
I will taste good in winter
When darkness and cold would keep me from growing
But I am boiled down
Bits of bone
Bits of stone
Bits of gristle and terror
In amongst what was once my personality.
What use is personality in this heightened moment?
No, I am naught but Fear Preserves.
A jam of the jammed.
Author: erainbowd
A figure like your father, Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pe, Appears before them and with solemn march Goes slow and stately by them.
Horatio paints a picture.
He picks up the grey
Squeezes it onto his palette.
He is starting with the general wash
Dotting in the details
Then spreading them from top to bottom.
He moves the brush across the canvas
Deliberately
From one side to the other
Pushing the picture in all directions
From the middle of the page.
Two nights together had these gentlemen, Marcellus and Barnardo, on their watch In the dead waste and middle of the night Been thus encountered:
Hang on.
Marcellus and Barnardo are gentlemen?
I mean, I don’t mean to split textual hairs here
But isn’t a gentleman a somewhat specific designation in this time and place?
It’s not like Horatio’s just finding a nice way to say
“These two dudes. . .” So if they’re gentlemen. . .
Their entire status is very much different than one would think.
It would mean that they’re not simple security guards.
They are noble fellows
Charged with protecting their country.
It could be that Marcellus knows
Where to find Hamlet most conveniently
Because he’s a courtier himself.
And gentlemen holding the watch
Says something very particular about the state of affairs in Denmark.
When the rich folk get conscripted, we know trouble’s coming.
For God’s love, let me hear!
Would you rather be blind or deaf?
Blind, blind, always blind.
A world without sight would be hard for certain.
I am obsessed with the spectacle of life
With the grand visual statements
With color
With shape
With the power of a bold bright image.
I would be bereft
If I were to lose my sight –
But to lose sound
Would break me into a thousand pieces
To not hear music
To lose the sound of your voice
The timbre, the pitch, the rhythm
To miss the gurgle of a stream
The shake of laughter
To lose sound
Would be to lose the very heart of me.
I don’t think I hear just in my ears
I hear all the way in here
The vibrations move me from the inside out
Listening is like my super power
Like what I do first and foremost.
If I were to lose everything –
Let me lose that last.
Season your admiration for a while With an attent ear till I may deliver Upon the witness of these gentlemen This marvel to you.
Everyone is pregnant
Waiting to be delivered of his or her own private marvels.
When the marvel comes,
Admiration pours in from all sides
And those of whom it is delivered
Become its ardent lovers.
Robyn (upon becoming a parent) asked what part of our biology
Gives us the instant belief that our children
Are the most marvelous of all the marvels in the world.
It is a smart trick of evolution
To make it so
That every child is held as treasure
To its admiring parents.
The King my father?
If my father were king,
There would be a lot of dances
And much singing.
He wouldn’t enslave the masses –
He’d just encourage them to get together and sing songs.
There would be a whole fleet of jesters for the amusement of the court and he’d
Send in choruses of children instead of armies.
He’d do his best to be a jolly royal
As he encouraged all his subjects to become peacemakers.
I don’t know if he would reign over an era of much prosperity or progress
But they would speak of those year’s noble attempts and royal pursuits.
My lord, the king your father.
Lord king
Father
It’s a sentence full of God.
My the your
My god, my Lord
The king, the god
Your god, your father.
I’ve never had religion
But I live in this religious net
The one in which
The lord is a god is a father
So that even when
My agnostic/atheistic roots are showing
My hair still grows with a
Fatherly lord god king
Because there is just something in the fabric of our culture
that can’t have it any other way.
Who?
This question dominated my youth.
I walked around wondering at everyone.
Curious about what made each who who.
And when there was no else around
I wondered in the mirror
Trying to work out who was reflected there.
Sometimes I managed both at once – looking at the who
In front of me and using the reflection as a mirror
To look at the who within.
I wonder what my question is now.
Sometimes it feels like it’s
What? What? What?
In all senses of Whatness.
Saw?
Report back
Explain the unexplainable
Try to capture a feeling in a word
A smell in description
The magicks of moments.
Worth the attempt, surely.
But will always be a wisp
A taste
A glimmer only
A glimpse.
But glimpses can tantalize
Scents can evoke.
The tiniest feeling of something
Might create its own transformation.
My lord, I think I saw him yesternight.
Just come out and say it.
Don’t preface your news with
I have something to tell you or
You might want to sit down.
Just spill it.
It doesn’t matter if it’s clear,
It will become so, eventually.
Don’t wait.
And whatever you do
Don’t say “I have to talk to you”
Just talk
It’s like those people who leave messages
That just say
“call me.”
I almost always don’t
In that situation
I need to know the news now
I don’t want to guess at it.
Of course, if you just called to say
Hello
And just want to have a chat,
That’s good too. . .
But oh my goodness
There’s nothing like a short brusque
“Call me”
To make me think of tragedy and run the other way.
The Hamlet Project 