A hell mouth opens

Just to shush a young prince

Trying to talk to his father.

The threat of hell looms large in this world and demons

Wait to entrap you

With the very things you love.

How is one to trust anything

When anyone could be a devil

Or in the devil’s power?

While a world of devils and spirits is very exciting to watch on a stage or a screen

It would be no mean trick

To survive such a seemingly magical hostile world.

He was switched
From calling his father’s ghost “he” to “it.”
And not even a complete “it” –
A contracted “it.” Two lines before it was “his” beard,
Now “it” will walk.
Of course, he’s switched back and forth
Several times before this moment
He clearly cannot decide what to do
With this information.
He. It. Him. His. It’s –
The back
The forth
What do you do with the ghost of someone you loved?
A thing that both is and is not the person that you knew.

Sometimes all I want to do is watch
To give up any sense of having to do –
To surrender to what is before
And just float along on the narrative someone else created
That someone else is responsible for –
A world in which all the decisions
Have already been decided
Where tragedy is either inevitable
Or forestalled
Inevitably
Because someone made it that way.
Some nights
Nothing else will do
But to find some way to watch.

This is the last question
Before Hamlet decides to go check out the ghost for himself.
The answer is such that it pushes him into action.
Simply the color of his father’s beard, as described by Horatio,
Is the final detail that he needs for confirmation.
I wonder if Hamlet had a particular affection
For his father’s beard.
I certainly remember when my father had a beard
And even more acutely
I remember when he shaved it off.
I came down one morning and there was a strange man in our house.
My mother soothed and assured me
That this was my father, yes.
I didn’t believe her still
Even when I stopped crying.
It was obvious that my mother wanted me
To believe that this stranger was my father
So I humored her
But remained deeply suspicious for some time.
Recently, one or the other of these parents
Told me that they had purposely
Had me watch as my father shaved his beard
To avoid this very problem.
I had watched the razor
Skim the hair and cream on his face.
I saw the beard vanish and a face I’d never really seen before emerge.
My memory erased this entirely
Even in my sleep that night
Leaving me never 100% sure that
There hadn’t been a strange father switch
When I was very small.

My favorite sketch
When I was a kid or a teen or something in between
Was called
“The Thing that Wouldn’t Leave.”
It was in a horror film genre
John Belushi was a guest
Over at this couple’s house
They tried everything to subtly get him out
They yawned
They hinted
He got out their records and started listening to them.
It strikes me now that it probably
Resonated so strongly with me
Because it takes an everyday terribly banal experience and mythologizes it.
Now I can fit this memory
Into the structure that I fit many of the things I love into,
Which is fairly convenient I suppose.
Or maybe I just loved those looks of horror on the couple’s faces.

In life
We repeat
We repeat
Words sometimes
Or phrases.
When actors try to
To say them
You know, to say them
They often sound ridiculous.
They sound ridiculous
But nothing could be more natural
Nothing.
I have a friend who says almost
Everything she says
She says twice.
It was not always so
But as she’s gotten older
You’ll know she’s finished her speech
Because she’ll say it twice.
If a character in a play did that
She would be a comic exaggerated persona
Probably a self-important duchess at a banquet
– or the host of an inn.
But my friend is an ordinary woman
Who just happens to say
The end of things twice
The end of things twice.

The salons of Venice
The Globe Theatre on its first opening
The birth of the 8 limbed girl
The moment a baby first laughed
When Madame Curie discovered radium
When Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salome
When Hendrix took the stage at Woodstock
When Sarah Vaughn stepped up to the mic
At the moment “Eureka” was first shouted
And every subsequent Eureka
But also the dark moments
Alone in corners
Feeling so far from human warmth
I wish I could be there too
To bear witness and to hug.

It is our eyes that lead us
Even when they are closed.
If my eyes look left
My body will, if all’s in order,
Look left too.
And if we fix our eyes to something
We let it lead us
Like a sailboat on the lake
Following the wind everywhere it turns.
But if we watch something so closely
It feels as if we are the cat
With a mouse in its sights
Waiting to pounce.
Who is leading, the mouse
Dancing from here to there
Or the cat whose gaze
Follows it everywhere?

When I got nervous
My chest would turn both pale and red
A sort of splotchy anger rose to the surface of my skin
Revealing all I had been attempting to hide. The blotches would often elicit a gasping concern
From the people around me –
The other auditioners or the speech contestants.
This is how I discovered the curiosity of my biology.
I looked down to what those competitors were pointing at
With their hands over their mouths
To see what they saw.
It was a while before I could answer
Without looking down
Before I could say “Oh, it’s fine. I just get splotchty when I get nervous.” This sort of physical transparency of my vulnerability, my emotional state
Laid bare for all to see
Sometimes made me feel cursed –
Especially in those moments
In which I was meant to be portraying beauty.
I took some pride in this part of my body
So to find it marred,
Disfigured by my emotions
Began a long battle between me and my emotions.
My betrayers , My gossipy tattle tale emotions
Leaking out wherever they could find a way
From the pale red of my chest
To the unstoppable tears in the face of someone’s cruelly
To the hunched shoulders of a girl protecting it all.

Turned down lips that purse a bit
Eyes toward the feet
Or narrowed
Focused to burning point
Jaw thrusts forward, up
Grinding into the skull
Brow furrows.
The frowning can begin here in the face
And spread to the shoulders
Folding them down and in
Like andirons before a fireplace
Hinged tighter
Chasing the fire out
The spine rolls out in the middle
Away from the fire
The belly ripples
Even the toes can huddle together for warmth.