A prayer for guidance
A ritual for receiving
A plea to the spirit
To cut through the noise of it all and find
A way to express
To tell
To explain
To point the way
A plea as simple as please.
Author: erainbowd
Stay illusion.
What you are has been made clear to me
I know you are immaterial
A veil
Between me and reality.
I know you have kept me
Blind and deluded
Laboring under false pretenses and impossibilities.
I know everything you told me was a lie
That everything I felt was unreliable
That everything I saw was colored with gauze
And not what it appeared to be.
You are a dream
From which I have awakened
I know there is no substance
No material
No there there.
I know I know I know
But don’t go.
I’ll cross it, though it blast me.
That thing before me,
The one that seems insurmountable,
The obstacle impossible –
I will stand in its sight lines,
Right in its crosshairs,
Between one plane and another.
From this position
I am a target.
I could feel a shaking and a rocking of all
That I have known.
Something could shoot right through me,
Standing in the path,
But stand here I must
Because this is my path, by god and
You cannot sway me from my forward march;
Try though you might.
In earlier times I might have stepped aside,
Let this cup pass,
Turned around around and tried another way
Another route
Another goal
Another end.
But the time has come to stand stalwart,
To build myself like a tower
One with a drawbridge and a moat
With loops and slits for shooting arrows
Arteries and spouts for boiling oil
And giant iron locks.
But this tower has legs
And once it is built it will walk past the blasts
Walk on
Into whatever comes next.
But soft, behold, lo where it comes again!
Hush your voices when the spirit arrives.
When it comes
You don’t want to be shouting or
Arguing.
You’ll want to cease your laughter.
No jokes now
No speeches
You may even find that your breath is too loud.
All that prattle is only a distraction
When spirit arrives
You want to do nothing but receive.
And even the like precurse of feared events, As harbingers preceding still the fates And prologue to the omen coming on, Have heaven and earth together demonstrated Unto our climatures and countrymen.
Precurse
Feared
Harbingers
Preceding
Prologue
Omen coming on
Word after word
Concept after concept
That whispers “foreshadowing”
Under these five lines
A little voice might as well whisper
“Something’s coming.
Horror’s on its way.
Prepare for something momentous.”
And then the ghost enters.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets – As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, Disasters in the sun; and the moist star Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands Was sick almost to Doomsday with eclipse.
Hey, at least the horses didn’t eat each other!
Caesar’s death may have caused the dead to rise and make strange noises
It may have caused the sun to go dark
And the stars to rain blood
But no horses eating each other.
Amazing how the death of a monarch
Shakes the very foundations of life.
The dead rose up out of their graves even in anticipation
Of losing Julius Caesar.
Yet, why should the dead care?
What does it matter to the dead
Wrapped in dirty sheets
Who rules?
The earth itself remains the same
No matter whose flags are planted on it.
Why the dead,
Who should be past caring,
Would climb out of the warm earth
To gibber on the streets for an emperor, I cannot fathom.
Except for the fact that it makes a good story.
A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.
A little grain of sand
Left in the folds of the brain
Like a pea left under a hundred mattresses
Making a sensitive person
Toss and turn.
The irritant growing and growing
Adding layer of shell
Layer of luminescence
Layer of indestructibility
Over the trouble
Making it harder and more real
But also more beautiful.
Well may it sort that this portentous figure Comes arméd through our watch so like the King That was and is the question of these wars.
See, it all makes sense
An ancient quarrel is unearthed
And so, of course, is the man.
With the land bestirred,
He who once ruled it
Must return to watch,
To be once again the guardian to his people.
Even if he didn’t rise from the grave,
The population would have to revive his image
To help them through the challenge to their borders.
This will not be the story of one man and his father
No indeed, we have not yet even heard the man mentioned.
This is a war drama, a ghost story
A tale of a land wronged
And a ghost come to right it.
So it would seem.
But this political story will very shortly become
Very personal
And this very simple explanation for the kings’ ghost,
His wardrobe,
His war-like stalk,
Will no longer seem so logical.
I think it be no other but e’en so.
It can be no other way but this
It’s got to be that
But
Be that as it may
This truth
Even so
This truth
Sure has a lot of negating words in it.
And this, I take it, Is the main motive of our preparations, The source of this our watch, and the chief head Of this posthaste and romage in the land.
Follow the lines back to the center and you find
The motive, the source, the chief head.
Like the Pleiades shooting all those stars from the same sun
It all comes from the same fountain.
The way creeks come from streams come from
Rivers come from the ocean
All are all are all are.
The Hamlet Project 