Three Poems (for Shakespeare)

Hello friends,

Three poems this time — two short, one lonnnggg — to mark Shakespeare’s birth/death week.

Enjoy! (And if you do, please consider supporting my work by purchasing my latest book The Robots of Babylon — and/or my book Stray Arts, from which the third poem is taken.)

HER MEMO (Anagrammed Lines, Rhyming Iambic Pentameter Triplet)

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Chat, Hamlet! Measure Romeo's display.
Her memo, Lear, amused a Scottish play.

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SHAKESPEARE (Palindrome)

Burst elm.
A hymnist.

Call a Romeo play
or a royal poem —

or all acts
in my Hamlet's rub.

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This final poem is a line-for-line perfect anagram of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy.

HALT ME

I sob to be, to quiet that other sonnet:
the End himself, the wrens of retribution....
To suffer sorrow’s league and air out nothings
or break its stalemate-saga out of reason
and die, deploy, be gone to thy spent poems?
A wooden temple broadens any eyes;
hence thou, snared, ask that thou hear tell, and ask
that Life Incessant rooms you — His the atom!
Yet, Piety, the loud weed looses doubt....
Our death creeps there, becomes the leap inert;
a nowhere — falsehood, myth, peacetime fast dreamt.
Or does the faithful soul, which fell, flame new?
Persist must we; the rest vague speech
that lies, can’t mollify a smoke, a fog
of bitter fear, deep wounds, low shores which moan....
To perch or plummet, go to prayers’ shown oneness?
Steal Life, his gazed supply, or Death endow?
To pause in coffin-flesh or end the scene?
That is the private torment: Know thy fate
when Kismet, hem high, qualifies the muse,
but know so bare the braided whole, His feared Law,
until fate’s verge, a red or tawny dawn
(both fade), is granted to the heart that fumed.
Endure or rot? My choice — whose tune-fond verbs
return the azure soul’s repellent will —
reveals a howl-bruised heart, the meek as sane....
The rotten know a fly-hot snow of teeth;
clocks swerve the coals, and so I am confused:
Do I unleash into the now, thus feature?
Depart with haste; choke life, its gothic soul?
Do I Zen-path and grant for me time present?
Draw weary curtains, shattering their hurt?
Of acts (they mount)? Of noose? A wooden nail?
His infinite horizon or thy hem? Appeal!
Remember: man sees blindly.