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.

To see emotion as a duty
Mourning as an obligation
This is the fundamental difference between these two men –
One will feel, will consider, will grapple with the waves that loss will bring to his shore
The other will respond according to tradition –
Any emotion he has will be pressed into an unrecognizable shape.
Does he mourn the brother he killed? If he does – he’s pressed this copper of the penny into a flat souvenir and printed his own seal upon it.
Then he condescends to his nephew stepson
And pats him on the head for doing something
He himself has not the slightest idea of how to do.

The sky like a coat rack
Clouds like a hanger
The sun like Velcro
Clouds passing like cotton cannot help but cling to it.
I am trying to be bright
To shine, to take my light and beam it wide
But these clouds are like moths to my flame.
They follow me
Shadowing my intentions
Standing between me and what I want
Surrounding me like pig pen’s cloud of dust.
These clouds, these dark heavy clouds
Seem to get fuller every day.
I wish it would rain and clear.
They would spend themselves in thunder and lightning –
Pour down torrents
Til every drop of cumulonimbus vapor has dissipated.
When the ground is drenched
I will be unburdened.

He doesn’t even get his own sentence by the time his royal uncle gets around to addressing him.
He’s been denied his position
Lost his father
(and his mother in her sudden remarriage)
He’s all at sea –
His uncle talks to almost everyone in the room but him
Before he finally faces him.
And he dares to call him “son”?
I still prickle when my stepmother
Calls me daughter and she married my father decades ago –
To risk that after a few days or weeks
Or whatever it is – no wonder Claudius gets interrupted.
If it were me, I’d be shouting,
“You are not my father!”
No matter how childish or out of propriety it might be.
My cousin and my son?!
Damn, Claudius, that was clumsy.