Hush your voices when the spirit arrives.
When it comes
You don’t want to be shouting or
Arguing.
You’ll want to cease your laughter.
No jokes now
No speeches
You may even find that your breath is too loud.
All that prattle is only a distraction
When spirit arrives
You want to do nothing but receive.
Horatio
And even the like precurse of feared events, As harbingers preceding still the fates And prologue to the omen coming on, Have heaven and earth together demonstrated Unto our climatures and countrymen.
Precurse
Feared
Harbingers
Preceding
Prologue
Omen coming on
Word after word
Concept after concept
That whispers “foreshadowing”
Under these five lines
A little voice might as well whisper
“Something’s coming.
Horror’s on its way.
Prepare for something momentous.”
And then the ghost enters.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets – As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, Disasters in the sun; and the moist star Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands Was sick almost to Doomsday with eclipse.
Hey, at least the horses didn’t eat each other!
Caesar’s death may have caused the dead to rise and make strange noises
It may have caused the sun to go dark
And the stars to rain blood
But no horses eating each other.
Amazing how the death of a monarch
Shakes the very foundations of life.
The dead rose up out of their graves even in anticipation
Of losing Julius Caesar.
Yet, why should the dead care?
What does it matter to the dead
Wrapped in dirty sheets
Who rules?
The earth itself remains the same
No matter whose flags are planted on it.
Why the dead,
Who should be past caring,
Would climb out of the warm earth
To gibber on the streets for an emperor, I cannot fathom.
Except for the fact that it makes a good story.
A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.
A little grain of sand
Left in the folds of the brain
Like a pea left under a hundred mattresses
Making a sensitive person
Toss and turn.
The irritant growing and growing
Adding layer of shell
Layer of luminescence
Layer of indestructibility
Over the trouble
Making it harder and more real
But also more beautiful.
And this, I take it, Is the main motive of our preparations, The source of this our watch, and the chief head Of this posthaste and romage in the land.
Follow the lines back to the center and you find
The motive, the source, the chief head.
Like the Pleiades shooting all those stars from the same sun
It all comes from the same fountain.
The way creeks come from streams come from
Rivers come from the ocean
All are all are all are.
Now, sir, young Fortinbras, Of unimproved mettle hot and full, Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there Sharked up a list of lawless resolutes For food an diet to some enterprise That hath a stomach in’t; which is no other, As it doth well appear unto our state, But to recover of us by strong hand And terms compulsatory those foresaid lands So by his father lost.
A man hungry for glory
Full of ambition and hot air
But starving.
He sharks up things to feed himself
Consuming whatever is before him
Indiscriminate and determined
Moving ever forward
Like a great white
Consuming.
And is it an accident that this insatiable shark
Has his hand up the skirt of a nation?
Our last king, Whose image even but now appeared to us, Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway, Thereto pricked on by a most emulate pride, Dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet – For so this side of our know world esteemed him – Did slay this Fortibras; who, by a sealed compact Well ratified by law and heraldry, Did forfeit, with his life, all these lands Which he stood seised of, to the conqueror; Against the which a moiety competent Was gagéd by our King, which had returned The inheritance of Fortinbras, Had he been vanquisher, as, by the same covenant And carriage of the article designed, His fell to Hamlet.
Back story back story
Important back story
Political battle back story
That, unless you’re really keyed in to Danish/Norwegian political talk
You might just tune out
Because this is one sentence
One LONG sentence
That doesn’t even answer the question.
There were heroics
There was a duel
One king vanquished the other
And land was his reward.
This is the moment when our king became our hero
And then became our ghost.
At least the whisper goes so.
It’s airy
Aspirated
Giving the news
Surrounded by breath
And secrecy.
The rhythm is long and hurried
Three sentences in one
The consonants pop
And the vowels are soft.
It’s the music of the wind
With words in.
That can I.
I’ve got this.
This one, I’ve got.
In this case, I have the answer
I’m the hero
I’m in the know
This one’s mine
I’ll hit this ball
I’ll kick that goal
I ring this bell.
I got it, I got it, I got it
Hand raised
Running across the field
At the chalkboard
In the studio
At the table
In the lab
I got it, I got it, I got it.
But, in the gross and scope of mine opinion, This bodes some strange eruption to our state.
A man who doesn’t believe in prophecy
Suddenly begins to read meaning in signs.
A ghost appears: Our country is fucked.
The one thing doesn’t usually follow the other
But in this case
He’s right.
He may preface his predictions
With qualifications
But the man has put his finger
On the volcano in the midst of Denmark
About to blow.
Then, in telling his friend about it
He hastens its explosion.
The Hamlet Project 