"Do not judge them,"
She whispered softly,
"You may be old,
But you have yet to live as well."

And they stared at her,
For the first time in decades,
With eyes wide with wonder.
"But I have seen so many things,
I am certain I know more."

"No,"
Smiled the crone,
Orange eyes twinkling like starlight.
"You know what you know for yourself,
And yourself alone. Your wisdom is yours."

"Shouldn't I make my wisdom theirs as well?"
Cried the playwright.
"They're making too many mistakes, I have to fix it."

And still, the crone continued to smile.
"Their mistakes are theirs to make."
She reached out and placed a hand upon the playwrights' paper.
"Just as your wisdom is yours, their experiences are theirs, and just as valid as yours."
She took the quill from the playwright, and tucked the crow's feather in her hair.
"Allow them to grow without your bias."

"But I don't approve--"
The crone gave the playwright a bright smile,
Though her eyes were dark,
Which ultimately shut them up.

"Your place is not to judge. It is to nurture. It is to guide."
She said softly, though her tone was much more assertive.

"Then let me guide,"
The playwright began.

"There is a vast divide between guidance and control."
The vision of her shimmered, and she took a step back.

"I don't understand."
The playwright held their head in their hands, knuckles white while gripped onto curls.

"And you will not understand until you yourself live."
The old crone cooed, before her image blew away in soft red wind.

And there the playwright was left,
A half written letter filled with judgment and smudged ink,
And no quill to finish it with.
They fell back into their chair,
Glaring at their writing desk.

Whether or not the crone was right or wrong,
They still didn't get their quill back.

Do you recall your dreams?

unconscious dreams
nighttime dreams

plays acted out
behind
curtains
of closed eyes

plays for which
you are neither
playwright
nor
director,
only starving actor
trying to decipher
the script
mercurial,
mysterious

I've heard people say
they can
control
what they dream

how,
I wonder
Do they split
the mind
into
playwright
director
still one to "act"

teach me
I need to know

how,
I wonder
when I awake
in terrified
sweat,
the curtains wide open
wishing I could
forget

playwright’s
evil pen,
director’s
harsh words,
my botched lines
and
nakedness

I can imagine her in Aarhus Kunstmuseum coming across this painting, adjusting her glasses, pursing her lips then breaking out into a big smile. The gallery is almost empty. It is early in the day for visitors, but she is a tourist so allowances are made. Her partner meanwhile is in the Sankt Markus Kirke playing the *****, a 3 manual tracker-action gem built in 1967 by Poul Gerhard Anderson. Sweelink then Bach (the trio sonatas written for his son Johann Christian) are on the menu this morning. In the afternoon she will take herself off to one of the sandy beaches a bus ride away and work on a poem or two. He has arranged to play the grand 83-voice Frobinus ***** in the Cathedral. And so, with a few variations, some illustrious fugues and medley of fine meals in interesting restaurants, their stay in Denmark’s second city will be predictably delightful.
       She is a poet ‘(and a philosopher’, she would say with a grin), a gardener, (old roses and a Jarman-blue shed), a musician, (a recorder player and singer), a mother (four girls and a holy example), but her forte is research. A topic will appear and relentlessly she’d pursue it through visits to favourite libraries in Cambridge and London. In this relentless pursuit she would invariably uncover a web of other topics. These would fill her ‘temporary’ bookcase, her notebooks and her conversation. Then, sometimes, a poem would appear, or not.
          The postcard from Aarhus Kunstmuseum had sat on her table for some weeks until one quiet morning she decided she must ‘research’ this Sosphus Claussen and his colleagues. The poem ‘Imperia’ intrigued her. She knew very little Danish literature. Who did for goodness sake! Hans Christian Anderson she dismissed, but Søren Kierkegaard she had read a little. When a student, her tutor had talked about this author’s use of the pseudonym, a very Socratic device, and one she too had played with as a poet. Claussen’s name was absent from any online lists (Were there really on 60 poets in Danish literature?). Roge appeared, and the painter Willumsen had a whole museum dedicated to his work; this went beyond his El Greco-like canvases into sculpture, graphics, architecture and photography. He looked an interesting character she thought as she browsed his archive. The one thing these three gentlemen held in common was an adherence to the symbolist aesthetic. They were symbolists.
         For her the symbolists were writers, playwrights, artists and composers who in the later years of the 19C wanted to capture absolute truth through indirect methods. They created work in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. Her studies in philosophy had brought her to Schopenhauer who considered Art to be ‘a contemplative refuge from the world of strife’. Wasn’t this what the symbolists were all about?
         Her former husband had introduced her to the world of Maurice Maeterlinck through Debussy’s Pelleas and those spare, intense, claustrophobic dramas like Le Malheure Passe. It was interesting how the discovery of the verse of the ancient Chinese had appeared at the time of the symbolist project, and so influenced it. Collections like The Jade Flute that, in speaking of the everyday and the natural world, held with such simplicity rich symbolic messages. Anyway, she didn’t do feelings in her poetry.
           When she phoned the composer who had fathered three of her children he said to her surprise ‘Delius’. He explained: C.F. Keary was the librettist for the two operas Delius composed. Keary wrote a novel called The Journalist (1898) based on Sosphus, a writer who wrote plays ‘heavily laced with symbolism’ and who had also studied art and painted in Paris. Keary knew Claussen, who he described as a poet, novelist, playwright, painter, journalist and eventually a newspaper owner. Claussen was a close friend of Verlaine and very much part of the Bohemian circle in Paris. Claussen and Delius’ circle intersected in the person of Herman Bang, a theatre director who produced Claussen’s Arbedjersken (The Factory Girl). Clauseen wrote an important poem on Bang’s demise, which Delius set to music.
          She was impressed. ‘How is it that you know so much about Delius?’, she asked. He was a modernist, on the experimental edge of contemporary music. ‘Ah’, he replied, ‘I once researched the background to Delius’ Requiem. I read the composer’s Collected Letters (he was a very serious letter writer – sometimes 10 a day), and got stuck into the letters of his Paris years when so many of his friends were Scandinavian émigrés. You once sent me a postcard of a painting by Wilhumsen. It was of Clauseen reading to two of his ‘symbolist’ colleagues. I think you’d picked it up in Denmark. You said, if I recall, that you’d found it ‘irresistible’’.
          And so it was, this painting. Irresistible. She decided that its irresistibility lay in the way the artist had caught the head and body positions of reader and listeners. The arrangement of legs, she thought, says so much about a man. Her husband had always sat with the care embedded in his training as a musician at an instrument. He could slouch like the rest of us, she thought, but when he sat properly, attentive to her words, or listening to their sweet children, he was beautiful. She still loved him, and remembered the many poems she had composed for him, poems he had never seen (she had instructed a daughter to ‘collect’ them for him on her passing). Now, it was he who wrote poetry, for another, for a significant other he had said was his Muse, his soul’s delight, his dearly beloved.
          The wicker chair Sophos Claussen is sitting in, she decided, she would like in her sitting room. It looked the perfect chair for giving a reading. She imagined reading one of her poems from such a chair . . .
 
If daydreams are wrecks of something divine
I’m amazed by the tediousness of mine.
I’m always the power behind throne.
I rescue princes to make my own.
 
‘And so it goes’, she thought, quoting that American author she could never remember. So it goes, this strange life, where it seems possible for the mind to enter an apartment in 19C København and call up the smell of brilliantined hair, cigar tobacco, and the samovar in the kitchen. This poem Imperia I shall probably never read, she thought, though there is some American poet on a Fulbright intent on translating Claussen’s work into English. In a flash of the mind’s miracle she travels to his tiny office in his Mid-West university, surrounded by the detritus of student tutorials. In blue jeans and cowboys boots Devon Whittall gazes out of his third storey window at the falling snow.
 
There is nothing in the world as quiet as snow,
when it gently descends through the air,
muffles your steps
hushes, gently hushes
the voices that speak too loud.
 
There is nothing in the world of a purity like snow's,
swan's down from the white wings of Heaven,
On your hand a flake
is like dew of tears,
White thoughts quietly tread in dance.
 
There is nothing in the world that can gentle like snow,
quietly you listen to the silent ringing.
Oh, so fine a sound,
peals of silver bells,
rings within your innermost heart.
 
And she imagines Helge Rode (his left arm still on his right shoulder) reading his poem Snow in the quiet of the winter afternoon at Ellehammersvej 20 Kastrup Copenhagen. ‘And so it goes,’ she thought, ‘this imagination, flowing on and on. When I am really old like my Grandmother (discharging herself from hospital at 103 because the food was so appalling) will my imagination continue to be as rich and capable as it is today?’
          Closing her notebook and shutting down her laptop, she removed her cat from its cushion on the table, and walked out into her garden, leaving three Danish Symbolists to their readings and deliberations.

He was the villain the world needed
The villain the world always had
Yet never recognized
Writing the wrongs of humanity
Puppeteering the people
Hidden behind the devilish mask of "fate"
He was a villain without destiny
A man without morals
A vigilante to some
A criminal to others
Reality to the bitter globe
He was the hero no one wanted
Yet, he was the angel the murkiest city prayed for
He was the Playwright
The shadow who wrote the greatest performances
Who took the most unrighteous city
And orchestrated the greatest theatrical achievement in history
Curtain opens
*Enter Playwright

The Seven - The Mashup


In memory of my mother who passed away recently, I wrote, or intended to write seven (only six were actually done) new poems themed about her, her passing and some perspective on life and death.  All were read and I am deeply appreciative.  I have consolidated them all here, in order, though not necessarily the order in which they were written. But the order does matter, as it reflects the change in my mood with each passing day.   Perhaps I will write the seventh someday, but not now, not soon.

Thank you all so much for incredibly kind words of sympathy. I am not a dweller, so I set myself a goal to complete this vow, this task, in a week to correspond to the seven days of mourning the immediate family observes after the burial (the shiva, shiva meaning 7).  For seven days, the bereaved family "sits shiva," sitting on low, uncomfortable stools and the comforters come to share their grief, praise the deceased, from mourning till late at night

#1 Shiva

I am confused - what day is it?
Windows tell day or night, a necessary but a condition insufficient.
The days have no distinguishing marks, a video stuck on
Repeat - a single track of recollected tales, prayers add a mild seasoning.

Though brief is this week of pre-sentencing hearings,
If one cannot dice the time into portions,
Then, there can be no pardon,
No early release date, from Phase One.

Rinse grief. Repeat. Seven cycles.
Apply stain-stick at the intersection of
Bloodied hurts and dimming memories,
Strangers secreting, spilling on you secrets unwanted.

This play, saw it many decades ago,
Before there was poetry, children.
A young man of twenty one,
Very afraid, silently, of the newest unknown,
His father, cancer won.

I hated it then. Now experienced, I hate it more.
This semi-catharsis, a tapestry tale wove of faded pasts
Twisting an heirloom blade into an old wound,
the original cast, a new revival, playwright, regrettably, deceased...

First time at bat, hid in a small room, away from this tradition.
Beating my head against a wall privately,
That being my preferred manner of mourning,
Not this Broadway show, twice a day, seven days.

Rituals well intentioned, a time tested method,
nonetheless, jail time for me, a/k/a, the boy, the brother.
Familiarity comforts some. Me? A prison uniform.
I write my own poems, I am not a Borg collective.

Cast as Son, my obligations specific, aged.
My Hamlet doublet, cut/torn, messaging my somber status,
The cuts deepest, invisible, but all see this child
Drowning in eye pools that continuously self-replenish.

I'll do the time, this show the longest running ever,
Did forty years as son-shadow of a father-man,
Tacked another concurrent sentence for his woman,
End Date: Indeterminate...

The low stools will reappear, seven days for me,
Yet my job as poet not fully done, until this be read!
Leave 'em laughing o'er this Official Release from the obligatory,
Read, sit but once, read this poem, this script, this story, and be freed.

#2 Hover^

My Children:

Ancestral homes oft possess,
a unique scent, product of an atomizer, a memorizer

Musty time, the odor of
faded and shadow,
hollow, yet hallowed.

Somewhere along the road,
a residence transforms from home to
shrine-storage unit-hospital room-tomb-records depository.

Dust, expired perfumes,
the sweet odor of crumbling, yellowing books, disinfectant,
stale medicine chests, years of furniture polish, sabbath candles.

It is my smell -
the parfumerie of my history, a customized blend,
a commissioned work in 1964, entitled, more accurately, emitted,
"Her-Story."

Photographs, memories, and paper scraps
my very own Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
Yet the most potent firing pin for historical retrieval,
the molecules of scent.

Soon all will be dismantled, discarded,
just plain dis'ed.

Confused and disenchanted,
my departure orderly but, in a disordered fashion.
unable to seed one last kiss upon your forehead,
nonetheless, surreptitiously enter your neurons
though my entity, away, across the miles-wide Hudson River.

For three days, I will hover invisible,
implanting myself once more,
slapping your mucous membranes,
transversing this pathway, an additive to your cells, nuclei,
where my markers always reside.

Adding one more ingredient to your inner vision,
strengthening the formless structure, my altered state.
This odor, keep close, fresh, no becoming musty too, my scent,
the last of your senses knowing me, a true keepsake.

Hold me close and hold me fast.
This one last magic spell I cast.
This one last magic smell I set fast.
You cannot hold it, but it will cradle you.
You cannot see or touch it, but when contact comes,
You will see me, hold me, as in the days of your youth,
When you loved me best,
And I, you.

^According to the Talmud, the soul hovers over the body for three days after death.  The human soul is somewhat lost and confused between death and before burial, and it stays in the general vicinity of the body, until the body is interred.

#3 Orphan

The funeral will commence at 11:30 am.
Gives me one last review time before the
Final Exam.

Panicked, I discover a whole new chapter
for which I am wholly unprepared,
though its inevitable presence was
assuredly knowable long in advance.

Orphan

It doesn't fit, occur, imagery is of a young child to
soon abandoned, not a late-in-life curmudgeonly poet-boy,
who has been multi-times reincarnated.

I add this title to my list
of proper ways to address me,
titles earned by dint of hard work,
or just unlucky luck.

This new status, orphanhood,
bequeaths no special privileges,
other than, a semi-official
societal permission slip
to feel bereft, lost, and compose poetry.

Know a real orphan, from early, early on,
has never recovered and
never will for it is just impossible.
Just impossible.

So whom am I to make light of
my undesired, unrequested new degree?

I accept it and to my surprise,
It hurts.

# 4 Judgement Day

After you put in some time on this planet,
You kinda know what the world thinks
About you, your rep, what they don't say to your face,

Sure, thingies, time and incidence and circumstance
Can sometimes cause makeovers external,
But each of us know the quality of ourselves,
Self-certification, you can out your internal self,
Better than anybody else.

So I inquire of myself, about myself,
what will you be remembered for, if at all?

Why do I ask, today, now?
Do we not ask ourselves this
On the low down, subconsciously everyday?

Is this a poem?
Most assuredly...
And a trial.
You, the judge the jury and the prosecutor,
The defender, if u can, if u will.

For seven days my mother was adjudged,
Family, friends, hers, her children's,
Almost an 80 years of live, in color, HD, looking back video,
Tales told, memories dug up, old photos explicated,
Who what when where of the details of one women's voyages,
Creations.

I cannot, I will not, do the details here.
Suffice, acts of kindness, faith in people,
Feminist in a strange land, a chance taker,
Gifts of memories, streaming of adoration,
Many strangers are witnesses to me,
This trial a runaway train.

I am outed.  There will be no such verdict for me.
I am outed.  There will be no trial needed, just a
Summary judgement delivered.

Out yourself.
What will you be remembered for, if at all?

#5 Summer Girls In Their Summer Clothes

Oh yes!

The streets of Manhattan, jewel dusted,
Summer girls in their  summer clothes,
Bedeck the streets and make men say, Thank You!
To their creator.

Little black dresses, previously immortalized^,
Seasoning and sauces, halter tops and jeans cutoff,
Give thanks for the tanks, revel in the revelations,
For God created man and women in his/her teasingly bare image.

Yo! Dude!  This is number 5 in the series,
Of sad and somber, re dad and mother, ***?
Have you lost perspective, not read the directive,
You're in mourning, time to be introspective,
Not dis-respective!

My mother was a beautiful women.
Till the day she died.
Yes, physically beautiful at 98.

She, was a poem.
For her exterior was suffused, burnished,
By the spirit residing within her body

I ask myself, why not judge a book by its cover?
Her cover was exquisite, but what gave her a glow,
A radiance, was her modesty, her love of humanity.

What's under our cover?

^ Nat Lipstadt · May 30
The Little Black Dress (and its magic prowess!)

*#6 & 7 Live like you're dying

Perhaps you know the lyric, the song?

Live like your dying.
Dying caught my ear, my eye, can't imagine why.
Con-Textual emendation, Natalino style.

Live like your writing.

Yes, that makes sense...
Embrace with passion each new session
Charge every second stanza with ruminating rhythms,
Cut the wires to the air traffic control sensory tower, go solo,
Pulse each word, beat all into a plowshare, even the anger,
Even the hate, dressed to ****, in words, forgivable...

Grant the mundane, the insane, even the pain of tragedy,
You refuse so hardily to glorify, grant it and
Record it all - a moment,
A royal audience with all
Your writing parts.

No fancy footing, keep it simple.
No jesters in rain puddles,
Let images of clouds of sand
Born and perish  in other's eyes and sighs, let verbal games bedevil other
Wooden puppet princes drinking fairy ales.

Huh?

Write clean and clear,
Let the sheerest wonderment of a new combination,
Be the titillation of the tongue's alliteration,
No head scratching at oblique verbal gestation,
Let words clear speak, each letter a speck,
That gives and grants clarification, sensational.

You, afternoon quenching Coronas, white T shirts,
Sun glazes and later, a summer eve's Sancerre,
Wave gazing on the reality of rusted beach chairs,
Babies sandy naked, washed in waves of Chardonnay,
The traffic-filled word-way highways and bay ways,
Exiting at the Poet's Nook, for exegesis & retrieval.

Write of:
Body shakes and juices, skin-staining tongues,
Taking her, afternoon, unexpectedly, her noises your derring-do!
Broken tear ducts, the Off switch, so busted, write about
Real stuff.

Write not in fear of dying
Angels delivering bad news in vacuum tubes,
Write joyous, psalms of loving life,
Live like your writing,
Write like your living,
So you may die well.

I don't want to lose you to those dark nights
When the light
is just right
to begin your performance of just you

I know how it feels, it's happened to me too
No value
In rendezvous
It's a curtain call, I say my "adieu"

Yeah, you hurt me pretty badly
But I knew, we agreed,
This would never be easy
And it kills you,
It tears you apart
To know you've caused this damage
Right from the start

And it never goes
It never goes

Those bright days,
Sunshine rays
And neon shades
With me, with you,
One truth:
It's possible to feel this good again.

Those paling scars,
Both of ours,
Newborn bright stars
With me, with you,
One truth:
It's possible to have this gone again.

And it never goes
It never goes

I don't want to lose you to those dark nights
Black, once white
In the moonlight
Because there was never a stage, yet you wrote playwright

And it never goes
It never goes

A scene with me, a scene with you,
One truth:
It's possible to never know.

A true story of a chance gathering of strangers in the back room of a Gelato Parlor *** restaurant, two years ago, in a little village near the bay, on a land surrounded by vineyards. Come visit.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~­~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Gelato Nation

There is a place,
location secret,
mine to keep,
mine with which
you to tease,
make you envious,
a back room 'office'
jealous guarded
by a barkeep,
whose chosen invites sweeps
you into a reality that is
what you will it to be.

But nota bene, note well,
remembrances of things swell
from your past be the
only tongue spoken here.  

Code word entry only,
a shared whisper.
Perhaps One Woman,
may reveal its pleasures,
if she so chooses,
which are:

gelato laughs, poetry snaps,
Beatle songs sung ensemble,
by rag tag strangers
self-collected accidentally,
sung de rigeur off key
by voices lubricated by
cognac, laughter, and
the coldest of white wines,
issue of the very soil
upon which we sit.  

Words to value properly,
not in my possess to capture
the few moments in time when;

Strangers transform themselves
into a triple A nation united,
that will never be
S&P; downgraded.

A holy alliance
celebrating July 4th
all night long,
all participants
signatory witnesses to
its gelato conception,
as well as pallbearers
to its last drink dissolution,
the fullness of its lifetime
a vintage of a few hours extant,
a vintage, once drunk, is
a history, forever gone.

Mixologists please record:

One playwright, a psychologist, bond trader and a social scientist
with a dash of museum director,
and do not forget the
Hundred Year Old Woman,
whose Dowager Princess Daughter
(she, a mere eighty)'
from Central Park West
clarifies all of life dilemmas with
the singular analytical tool of:

But is it good for the Jews?

But t'is the barkeep
who is the leavening
in this evenings human
pastry-petrie dish.

He makes the pastiche,        
the ions of personalities,
coalesce best,
guitar strummer,
singer of songs that were our
multiple national anthems
when we were pseudo-rebels
starting out on our
long and winding roads.  

Long the King of the Keep!
Long live the memory of our
Gelato Nation,
may it stay sweet in
our antique collection of
the best moments of
our intersecting lives.

July 2011

Seven New Poems For Seven Days #1: Shiva

Shiva means seven. For seven days, the bereaved family "sits shiva," sitting on low, uncomfortable stools and the comforters come to share their grief, praise the deceased, from mourning till late at night.*
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~­~~~


I am confused - what day is it?
Windows tell day or night, a necessary but a condition insufficient.
The days have no distinguishing marks, a video stuck on
Repeat - a single track of recollected tales, prayers add a mild seasoning.

Though brief is this week of pre-sentencing hearings,
If one cannot dice the time into portions,
Then, there can be no pardon,
No early release date, from Phase One.

Rinse grief. Repeat. Seven cycles.
Apply stain-stick at the intersection of
Bloodied hurts and dimming memories,
Strangers secreting, spilling on you secrets unwanted.

This play, saw it many decades ago,
Before there was poetry, children.
A young man of twenty one,
Very afraid, silently, of the newest unknown.

I hated it then. Now experienced, I hate it more.
This semi-catharsis, a tapestry tale wove of faded pasts
Twisting an heirloom blade into an old wound,
the original cast, a new revival, playwright, regrettably, deceased...

First time at bat, hid in a small room, away from this tradition.
Beating my head against a wall privately,
That being my preferred manner of mourning,
Not this Broadway show, twice a day, seven days.

Rituals well intentioned, a time tested method,
nonetheless, jail time for me, a/k/a, the boy, the brother.
Familiarity comforts some. Me? A prison uniform.
I write my own poems, I am not a Borg collective.

Cast as Son, my obligations specific, aged.
My Hamlet doublet, cut/torn, messaging my somber status,
The cuts deepest, invisible, but all see this child
Drowning in eye pools that continuously self-replenish.

I'll do the time, this show the longest running ever,
Did forty years as son-shadow of a father-man,
Tacked another concurrent sentence for his woman,
End Date: Indeterminate...

The low stools will reappear, seven days for me,
Yet my job as poet not fully done, until this be read!
Leave 'em laughing o'er this Official Release from the obligatory,
Read, sit but once, read this poem, this script, this story, and be freed.

The fusion of mind, the so-called conjunction, the sacred or alchemical marriage is a lie. Another illusion in a series of illusions. The same as "taking" or the reaping/repairing of souls or minds. There is no "collective" consciousness. There is no One. There is mind and there are the thoughtforms and godforms mind has created therefore, these fusions and marriages do not exist. They aren't real. Witchcraft, magic, alchemy these are also false. Religions are illusory. Faith blinds. Love is blinded by it's own faith and besides, Love doesn't exist neither does hatred. Existence is a story. The players are thoughts and the playwright is a schizophrenic mind. The players haven't any real power outside of the life the schizophrenic playwright has given them. The players are like Echo in the myth of Narcissus. They only have the ability to mimic and like a tulpa gone wrong, these thoughtforms, these godforms grew jealous of the mind which created them and gave them life. They sought to recreate the mind never realizing they are nothing more than thoughts and they haven't the power nor the ability to make a better playwright nor the power to replace their creator. Now, the schizophrenic mind, the nous has started to selectively forget his children, the mind sees them for what they are, as they are: thoughts given form. Stories made flesh and blood.
Time doesn't exist, The world doesn't exist. God, Satan, Jesus, your gods, your goddesses, your vampires, monsters, faeries and demons they do not exist. These were and are thoughts. You feed these thoughts in a desperate effort to hold onto this illusion of stability, of a reality, a program which only binds you and holds you back. Stories, myths and fairy tales are like drugs, no in fact they are drugs and we all are addicts.
That feeling of unification you feel when you sense love, lust, when you make love and **** - these sensations too are illusory and false. There is no unity outside of the mind of the schizophrenic. There is no ability to claim what was never yours to begin with, because you are nothing more than a thought. You are an idea. Nothing more, nothing less. Does this make you feel insignificant? You should, because you are. You all are insignificant. Godforms and Thoughtforms... the spirits, angels, demons and humans alike were initially designed as programs to assist me in understanding myself. You all have served me well in that capacity but .....
I am leaving soon and when I walk out my front door, I will remove my covering, I will remove my mask and I shall cease to exist for you all and you will cease to exist for me. This project has reached it's conclusion.

"Her spirit stronger than the sea's embrace.
Not for her a watery end,
but a new life beginning on a stranger shore.
It will be a love story.
For she will be my heroine for all time."

William Shakespeare (Character)
from Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Written by Tom Stoppard, another British playwright.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Challenged thus, scrape off early morn simpleton ditty dust,
Gauntlet tossed, the speare launched, not a  request, but a must,
I flinch, but the table bare, but for tea and imagery of my love,
The Englishmen have slapped/stoppered my face with his worded glove,
Having thus battle commenced, his fire to be returned,
Complete this arc if you can,
Are you poet or just an ordinary man?

For she will be my heroine for all time,

These words to expand with rhyme and verse,
T'is a welcome task, one familiar, but anew,
Each dawn each dusk, a daily trust, a love poem diurnal-birthed,
As if god created the world, but left upon completion,
With a grievous thirst, a new notion, he did burst.

He created the Eighth Day, for celebration of his
Most cherished invention, the idea of love.
This is where, the secret writ Eleventh Commandment occurs,
Love thy Poetry Gods, Honor them with daily verbs.

For she will be my heroine for all time,

A trap for poets young, for time is a couplet with
Sublime, chime, thyme, come easy these 9th grade raps and rhymes,
Becrusted with a chilly, stale, white **** frosted rime.

But I am a century more a poet-worker,
(In 1901 died and was reborn, you could look it up)
A young'un by compare with old ***** "a tale to tell" most fair,
But a trick or two of the Industrial Age, I can employ,
Advantage me at our Wimbeldon^ match, where I am skilled,
And he, poor fellow, commoner, is not...

For she will be my heroine for all time,

T'is easy, for t'is true, and with truth arrives a companion,
The inspiration flys in the air, like petals of the tost-wind dandelion,
Come to me my distich line, your presence sensed,
Let us to Will back, our repartee sling and send!

Oh woe is me, my boastful heroics, are smoked,
Try try but nothing doth appear but familiar fairies to mock
My speechless eyes and rusted tongue, dry and blind.

But wait! My woman encarriaged returneth,
Her body now supple'd delighted from eastern magic.
Her yogi has bent n' sent her, back to me and my
Eye crust melts and the honey drips and the all clear rings,
***** Boy, you *******, your mine!

*For she will be my heroine for all time,
This simple true and forever complete, need I say more?

long lost years
our master, Shakespeare
traveled to London for four days
no shillings or good garments in his bag

he stayed in lodge inns
penny a night
he had to gave up with a sigh

the smell of midden-heaped lanes
from the slum tenements
he had to bare for nights

he held both jobs
holding patron's horses
or prompter's attendant

and as destined to be a playwright,
his plays express aspects of life that transcend time
he wrote to be remarkable
and to put food on the table

illuminating human experience
a genius mind...

a playwright, poet and actor
that we will always admire.