Did Claudius always have witchcrafty wit?
When the Royal brothers were boys,
Was Claudius the smart one, the crafty one, the brains of the operation?
Was Hamlet the brawn? Practical at sledding poleaxes or beating up his younger brother?
I wonder if Claudius often got his brother into trouble –
If he got him punished for things he himself had done.
I wonder if Claudius talked his brother into circles, fooling him,
Damning him with these spell like words.
Perhaps, to Claudius, there was always great injustice in the succession.
Perhaps, he’d always felt he deserved the crown, that the system was unjust
Because it promoted the thicker of the two.
What sort of wordy witchcraft did Claudius perform even during his brother’s reign?
Was he constantly attempting to unseat his brother before he finally resorted to murder?
Did he try Iago’s tactics? Aaron’s? Don John’s? Richard the Third’s?
Or did he bide his time – planning, quietly scheming for this violent moment?
What finally pushed him toward the fateful poisoning?
What indignity did he feel he endured? What slight?
Or did everything coalesce to that fratricidal moment in the garden?
How many fratricides did he commit in his mind before the one he actually committed?

A cartoon snake sits on a throne wearing a crown.
He slithers to a garden where a king lies sleeping.
He bites him on his ear sending his venom through the king’s brain and into his blood
Then undulates around until he can push the crown off the king’s head,
Sending it clattering onto the stones nearby.
He noses it until he can get it upright – until he can put his snakey head beneath it.
He sits upright, like a cobra, proud and smiling with a crown on his scaly head.

Process would seem to be something that could not be forged.
By its very nature, a process would seem to be what happens. It is the product
That can be forged or the story of the process.
Papers, I suppose, can be forged. Papers
Which are the processing of somone’s application for a wedding license
Or a gun permit or refugee status
But real or genuine papers (Is there a difference? They’re both genuinely paper.)
Are seemingly processed just the same,
Denmark is abused by a forgéd process.
The king’s death certificate went through the channels,
Got stamped “Accidental” instead of “Murdered” and from there, as the certificate
Travelled along the conveyor belt of Danish Law,
It kicked off the entirely wrong switches
Creating thereby a fake process.

Do snakes sting?
I thought they only bit.
If they don’t (and I don’t think they do)
Then this little bending of truth does still make alliterative assonant sense.
A snake bit me doesn’t have the ssing, winding, serpentine quality
That a serpent stung me does.
Sometimes sound trumps sense
Even for the dead.

Is this the first time the Ghost
Has said his son’s name?
(Which is, of course, also his own)
What does your name sound like in the mouth of a ghost?
What does it sound like in the mouth of your father?
I read a silly article in which
They asked kids what love was
And one of them said you knew
Someone loved you by the way they say your name –
That when there is love, your name
Was safe in their mouth.
Does that change in the transition
From life to death to ghost?
How much love is in this instruction to hear?
Also how many synonyms for listening is this ghost gonna use?
Mark, List, Hear.
He really needs to know
That we’re paying attention.

The internet will not work
So I must rely on the lexicon in my mind
To work out what lethe warf might signify. Is it the edge of death?
I know people in lethe sleep –
Is it like the River Styx somehow?
And what is this plant, this weed
That grows on a warf?
Why dull? It would seem that a plant with roots that will not stir
Is a sturdy plant, a reliable plant –
One that will not be blown about by wind or wave.
But whatever this mystery plant is
It is not a favorite of this ghostly king.

Wait. What’s he saying here?
Is he saying what I was saying before?
That any murder is most foul?
But especially this one?
Which, now, in additon to being foul and unnatural,
Has also become strange.
I don’t know anything about rhetoric
Or rhetorical patterns but I am
Interested in the pattern of
Most unnatural
Most foul
Most foul
Foul and unnatural murder
Murder most foul
Most foul, strange and unnatural.
It makes me think of a sestina –
The way the words rearrange
And shift over the course of the repetition.
The only sestina I can call to mind
Is this one by Elizabeth Bishop
Which features a gasoline can, I think.
I can remember none of the words
(exept perhaps esso s-o-esso?)
but I remember the feeling of the poem
nostalgic and tactile and it makes me
long for something old and rusty that I never really knew.
This sentence of the ghost’s feels like it’s like that –
Really just a repetition of words
Where the meaning isn’t nearly so significant as the feeling.

I’m not sure it was the MOST unnatural murder.
Maybe it’s the culture we live in now
But I hear about much more foul, much more unnatural
Murders all the time.
As far as getting murdered goes
Getting some poison in your ear
Isn’t nearly as gruesome as most things.
It’s not even the most foul or unnatural murder in Shakespeare.
I’d pick almost any death in Titus Andronicus over this one
In the foul and unnatural department.
But – I cut the ghost some slack.
Any murder that happens to you
Is bound to be the most foul and the most unnatural.

In becoming a a ghost,
Hamlet’s father has not only lost his life and his body,
He seems to have lost the sense of himself.
He speaks of himself in the third person
As if he is not Hamlet’s dear father
As if Hamlet’s dear father were some distant foreign figure
As if the person saying these words had nothing to do with the father once loved.
He is Hamlet’s father’s spirit.
He is not Hamlet’s father. Nor does he seem
to be any other identity of the former king of Denmark.
Wait – strike that – he’s dressed as the version of himself that once went to war
But he’s not wearing his crown, he’s wearing his helmet.
Which makes me wonder –
Is the spirit that walks these walls the version of his father that Hamlet most remembers?
Is this the idealized vision of his dad?
Younger, triumphant, coming home from the wars.
Little boy Prince runs to these arms as a child
Not the stately king.
This ghost, disconnected from all of his worldly initiatives and desires
(Save one: to get revenge against his brother)
Can not even identify himself as the one his son dearly loved,
He just calls that identity up
To compel the prince to what he wants him to do.
Ghost psychology, though, is tricky.
No one really knows the rules.

I just cackled when I saw what my sentence was today. Now, I’m trying
To work out what inspired that enthusiastic laugh.
It’s a great line. So simple.

Every day I ask groups of people
To listen to me. Never have I said: List, list, O list! (Maybe I should.)
It’s just so unabashedly theatrical. 
Or I suppose one might say melodramatic.
Let’s settle for dramatic.

A big ole ghost
Who already has all the attention he could possibly need
Has to say “List, list, O list!”?

Why? Given what we’ve just heard
About flesh and blood ears – maybe it’s some kind of incantation to ready human ears
For really freakin’ startling news.
He says these words, vibrates the ear follicles a little bit to this rhythm
And then lets it loose.