Elsinore: Gertrude’s Song
Elsinore:
Stark battlement of the mind
where ghosts walk the ramparts of memory.
Hamlet
insanity becomes passionate youth.
Ophelia
lyrical and lovely; poetical madness.
Me?
I am too old for such beautiful, romantic gestures.
My body is marked by age’s cruelty and long despair.
Rapier marked, a thousand cuts still sing their sting in
the dark regions of a dungeoned mind.
I did what I had to do.
I hurt too much for an easy death
guilt dripped I
am denied the fantasy of a benign heaven and bowered sleep.
Those are the dreams of youthful innocence.
I am old, madness is now senility, stagnant with contempt and disgust.
Atrophying even as I breathe in and out. Molten
my flesh seeps
candle wax. I hurt so much, oh God so much!
Let the wind blow, that my flame expire and my spirit rise to
the hallowed space in the rafters where God resides, that he may
forgive my life;
and grant me peace...peace... for I am sick at heart and the midnight hour
draws close when spectral visions detach from the shadows and a
phantasmagoria parades the battlements of mind.
There is no innocence,
just cause and effect,
need and use, an interaction between life and death,
womb and grave, only the fool knows the real truth.
He stands watching and laughing as roles are allocated and accepted. The play begins and ends at his direction. God wears a jester’s crown.
I hear the cackle of laughter pitching higher and higher:
now who’s mad?
Jester
Poison; bring me poison in a medieval cup
a dramatic gesture to suit the passion of the moment.
I hate my life, my worthless, pathetic existence.
I’m a vulgar joke, a travesty, a hideous jester making
mocking observations on the banality of it all, while dying
painfully from the truth of it.
Afraid to live afraid to die, I live the jester’s life
caught in a Shakespearean tragedy.
Copyright Fabian Black 2009
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