What are a spirit’s ears made of?
What else can hear?
The ghostly ear may be made of vapor and mist
Or forms its drums and cochlears
From breath, from wind, from sea foam
From fog – the chambers gather together
Into intricate misty conch shells of hearing
Designed, perhaps, especially for hearing
Troubling descriptions of hell.

Whatever word might be spoken
(From lips gathered together from starstuff and wind)
It vibrates at some frequency that is destructive to the delicate human ear.
Its little strands of hearing
Might well stand on end like the quills of a porcupine
And then snap off like pine needles from a tree.

Do the Infernal Powers That Be
Provide an orientation to life in the afterlife?
Are the spirits put onto folding chairs
Given a packet and a lecture by a man
With a laser pointer – and warned
Not to speak of their torments.
Are they shown pictures of human ears
Bleeding post description? Diagrams of
What happens to the drum (Swelling, rising, Infernal explosion.)

Hell must be run by bureaucrats in dull gray suits
Who keep the ghosts on schedule and in line.
It’s interesting that the reason Hamlet Sr. doesn’t
Tell his son what his after life is like is NOT
That he doesn’t want to freeze his son’s young blood
But because he’s forbidden to do it.

They never seem to have notes on the stuff I’m really curious about.
This edition goes ahead and explains that a porcupine, when it gets anxious,
Lets forth its quills. Even if I couldn’t work out that a porpentine was a porcupine,
I still don’t know that I’d need this note.

What I want to understand is Hamlet’s hair.
It’s knotted? His locks are combinéd?
Does Hamlet have dreds?
Or is his father concerned about his son’s
Messy hair? Did young Hamlet, as a boy, never
Comb his hair? Did it get into tangles?
Does the Prince of Denmark have bird’s nests
In his hair? Patches of disorder?
This image makes it sound like his
Hair is a briar patch of a mess
That will untangle and separate
Into a porcupine’s back as soon
As his father speaks a word about
His experience of hell.
I want to understand this knotted business.
It feels like it could open up
A box of curiosities about Hamlet
And his father or just how Hamlet
Does his hair (or doesn’t do his hair)
When he gets up in the morning.

What are these foul crimes of which Hamlet Sr. speaks?
One assumes his days of nature are his life (nice way to put it, Ghost King!)
so we don’t really have a ballpark timeframe for these foul crimes.
Foul crimes sound a lot more serious than just your run of the mill sins.
One assumes he has taken the Lord’s name in vain and other such pecadillos
But what does he see as his foul crimes?
He did some smiting of the sledded pollack on the ice – that’s possibly something –
And he is a king. Probably you don’t get to be or stay one of those without a little
Foulness. But what? What?
It opens the door for me to wonder what Hamlet’s father was like in life.
Hamlet says a lot of nice things about him – how loving he was to Hamlet’s mom,
Like various shining gods
But he has died before those things get said
and the bad stuff loses weight
(Or perhaps it is just burned away in the fires.)

Ghostie drops a little bomb right here.
If this line were the trailer to the movie,
It would reveal a key plot point
Before anyone could see it.
It seems like a sort of accidental spoiler,
Like he didn’t mean to reveal this bit to Hamlet at first.
He has a speech from here. It might even be a prepared speech. There is a certain
Orderliness to it, a stentorian preparedness, a rhetorical announcement
To what he is about to say.
But what he says here
Feels like it just slips out –
Like a mouse out of a hole
That scurries quickly back in
But that once it’s out,
You can never quite forget.

I could choose which of my hearings to listen with.
I have a selection available –
This one is my serious hearing
But my comedy hearing does come in handy very often.
When times are tough, the tragic hearing
Can work me up to a real grade A melancholy.
I’ve got half-assed hearing, metaphoric hearing
(this one will generate the most poems,) dramatic hearing,
bureaucratic hearing, rock n roll hearing, family hearing, child hearing,
teacher hearing, spirit hearing, organizational hearing, strategical hearing,
mystery hearing and abstract hearing. The surrealist hearing will usually make me laugh in unexpected places. Musical hearing can help me manage car alarms and shouts in time. The textual hearing helps with meaning. There’s an abundance really.
Flip through the catalogue. Choose one. Surprise us both.

6 am: Time to flambé!
The torture of the afterlife is very regimented.
You get some time to haunt your old battlements –
Do some stalking, some sorrowful faces, some almost speaking
And then back on the clock for fiery torment
When you’ve done your hours in the furnace,
You can punch out for the night – go back to haunting if you like.
This is not free form torture
No, sir – every minute is scheduled –
So you feel each second, note each hour passing
(Or not passing) like a terrible job that will never end.
Poor ghosts punching the Inferno Time Clock.

Classsic ghost.
Your average ghost is terse like this, right?
You’re gonna get “Booooo.” Or “Guilty!” or “You did it.”
“Mark me” fits right into the ghostly repertoire
You might wonder if he has words at all after an opener like that.
Maybe death turns a person monosyllabic.
Turns out
It doesn’t.
Not for this ghost anyway –
He’s gonna head right to several three syllable five dollar words in a few seconds
But he starts as classic ghost.
I wonder, though, if Hamlet Sr. spoke like this in life, too.
Was he given to pronouncements?
He was a king, after all – and presumably for some time.
Perhaps his speech was always peppered with preparations like this.
Maybe it was a ritual with him
Before he spoke
To demand attention
That he already had.