Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer?
Is that what’s happening here?
A fatal mistake, really –
Back at school, the student might forget the wrongs done him.
He might allow the sting of the loss of his position to diminish.
He might wrap himself up in philosophy
In language
In science
In words
In books
And trouble himself a lot less about the world back home
Where his country putrefies from the top down.
But place him next to you
Beside the throne that ought to have been his
Smelling the wine you drink and the scent
Of his mother on you –
Place him where the world can easily compare you
And hope to elevate him back to his rightful place.
Place him where he can ferret out your actions; You create your own end there, Claudius.
You calculate yourself into your grave.

Is this the MOST formal declaration of love in history?
Count the words between “love” and “you.”
Even in declaiming his affection for his family,
He distances the word “love” from both himself and
His alleged beloved son/nephew.
To “impart toward” a person, too – is not the most
HEARTFELT way to express affection.
Perhaps this is all politics is.
Just taking the ends of love and pulling it, like taffy
End from end
Until it is a thin strand that one can tie into knots
Wrapping over and over itself
So that no part of it can be distinguished from another.
Just words
Like sticky
Inedible
Candy.

Woe, thrown to the earth
Will burrow itself into the ground and nestle itself
among the roots of the other plants.
It will reach its feathery roots
Around it, pulling on the vines that are its neighbors.
It will poke its head through the topsoil,
A new face of woe:
Despair, transfigured
Rising, inch by inch
Into a tiny green shoot aspiring to the sky. Woe will push its way through the ends of leaves
Until it balloons out into a plump pod of loneliness
Which unfolds and drips
Pink, white and red
Raining pollen of pain and dispersing it
Out into the wind.

Common common common
Fault fault fault
Death of fathers
Dead
Corpse
Died
He’s hammering quite heavily
On this nail.
Yet there is something
Quite a bit clearer and elegant
About this hammering.
 He’s singing now –
He’s found the theme he can
Really jam on.
This is a tune
He can swing to.
Death of fathers – give me that old 1, 2, 3

Let’s start a campaign to bring back the word “peevish.”
It’s so perfectly onomatopoetic
So perfectly dismissive
So peevishly peevish.
We might say “peeved” now
But it’s not ths same. . .
Too close to “P.O.d”
Which is terribly terribly
Unpoetic
Not to mention
Unonomatopoetic.

Common again.
This must be the story the King and Queen
Tell each other.
Come on
Death is common
Come on
This is no big deal
People die every day.
Eat. Sleep. Fuck. Die.
Common.
To dwell on the dying
Would be as vulgar as
Discussing what we do in our beds
In public. They say this in their bed –
Justifying several things at once.
It’s perfectly natural, this –
It’s common.
Death. Sex.
Neither will we discuss
Anywhere but here.
When challenged, just by rehearsal, they tell the same story.
“Thou know’st tis common.” “as common as any the most vulgar.”
Come on.

This is how men beat each other with words
Making manhood a kind of box
That gets smaller and smaller
Until the actions that fit within it
Are reduced to grunting and chest thumping.
Surely a man is a man
No matter what he is feeling
Or saying
Surely we want our men to have the breadth of human experience
Not to be consigned to a definition
That leads them into wars and cancers, where despair eats away at an organ
Where it cannot find its way out of the body
We say “Be a man” as if it were something outside of the self
A woman just is – she never needs to “Be a woman.”
We might tell her her anger or fury are unfeminine
But we’d never tell her to be a woman about it
We’d simply tell a man to stop being a woman about it.

So I guess Claudius didn’t cry too hard over the loss of his dad.
The father Hamlet’s father lost was presumably Claudius’ father as well.
At his loss, he did obsequious sorrow. He does not say he felt it.
This makes me wonder about Claudius’ childhood. Had he always hated his brother?
Presumably Hamlet Senior was first born –
Heir to the throne of Denmark
Probably his father’s favorite.
Grandfather Denmark probably sat with him, talked him through
Affairs of state, at least, (even if there weren’t lots of Father/Son heart to hearts)
While little Claudius sat by
Tied to his nursemaid,
Longing for a father
But getting nothing but envy.
Grandfather Denmark
Could be said to have killed his son Hamlet
By way of favoring him.
It was he who must have planted the seed of hate in his second son.
He gave his first born strength and pride and heroic battle skills.
He gave his second, patience, political maneuvering around immovable obstacles
and a fratricidal heart.