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Jean Aug 2018
If you are Horatio, let me be Hamlet
Because I need you right by my side
If I must face what is to face

If you are Horatio, let me be Hamlet
Because if I face what is inside
I might need you to be my brace

If you are Horatio, let me be Hamlet
Because if I need someone to hide
All the ghosts I see, it’d be my ace

If you are Horatio, let me be Hamlet
Because if I get caught up in the tide
I’d need you to bring me down from space

If you are Horatio, let me be Hamlet
Because when my hands are seldom tied
I’d need you to come unlace

If you are Horatio, let me be Hamlet
Because if there is someone to be alongside
You’d be in just the right place

Because if you are Horatio,
let me be Hamlet
Composed sometime in 2018.
Julie Grenness Mar 2016
This is Horatio's elegy,
He and the mousetrap had synergy,
That's the end of mouse energy,
Alas, Horatio is no more,
That fur friend predator,
He ran into the  mousetrap's door,
Alas, Horatio is no more!
How to embellish this ode?
I'm in hunter-gatherer mode,
Shall I serve him up for lunch?
Nuke him for tasty munch?
Eat it skin on for nutrients,
Now I know what Nigella meant,
No, Horatio wasn't pregnant,
Now I have a fur friend remnant,
That little mouse predator,
Of mice I am no amator,
Alas, Horatio is no more!!
The sequel to God's gift of  a fur friend, mouse.  Feedback welcome.
Stark  Dec 2018
Horatio
Stark Dec 2018
a wise eyed cynic
head full of rational thought
ignored by his only friend

as i descend into madness,
will you be my Horatio?
standing through it all
with the utmost clarity?

Oh, to be Horatio
as your closest friends are dragged into the clutches of insanity
shakespearean bffs, pt 1
martin  Sep 2012
Jay and Horatio
martin Sep 2012
Jay                                                                      Horatio

By the door in the flower ***                            The man who planted all these trees
Among the beans in the veggie plot                Alas I knew him well
In the lawn, everywhere -little oak trees-         He did not see them to maturity
Do you know who puts them there?                How long our years we cannot tell

I've only ever seen it once                                  Now strong and spreading to their prime
He does it when you're not around                  They seem to thank him for their chance of life
He does it taking lots of care                             In gratitude they sway and soar
He puts an acorn in the ground                        And breathe for him as he can breathe no more

He thinks he's coming back to it                      We thank the Jay for acorns
When he feels the need                                      Unwittingly he sows
But mostly he forgets                                         And plant like him we must
So germinates the seed                                       Although like him we may not see them fully grow

                                       As I look up at this fresh green canopy
                                             I think of all the tiny saplings
                                                   And of what will be
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2017
that's 3 weeks without a keyboard,
that's 3 weeks on a dual-detox -
         that's that: roughly: antagonism
of: once upon a time...
           there can only be one Hans Andersen,
and as the story goes: ol' granny
   passed on the tales, without which:
no talk of posterity, and seances at
the theatre; alternatively: what if Kierkegård
opted for opera, rather than theatre?
    well: horrid is the task of dropping names,
as if being a village idiot, in that
capacity: giving directions... no such thing!
  nonetheless: a horrid task...
3 weeks... without this horrid world-entanglement...
amphetamines in the wild west,
                   and yet... everything slows down...
that's 3 weeks without such ''luxury''...
    and would you believe it?
3 weeks went by: in a blink of an eye.
             strange, or what 21st century writers
fail to recognise: the ******* canvas has changed!
any-single-one-of-them bothered to scrutinise
this new canvas? anyone?
     ah yes, it's still in its adolescence -
it's still: Dostoyevsky, scuttering in the grand
dungeon: that's the Moscow underground.
             the canvas! the canvas!
                             and indeed, if this be some
bellowing horn, from the depths of some forsaken
place... i'll go into the street, and sabotage
civilisation with graffiti...
                     then again: i have the least
expectations, such that capitalism works...
poetry... and what investment have you made?
nil, or almost nil... evidently: zilch!
      ah, but to have invested in canvases,
a studio, paints, brushes... see... no one sees
investment in poetry: primarily because the poet
has done the minimal...
            unless of course it turns out to ****
with a hot poker something once resembling
nations... which now resides in the insane asylum
(even though those, have been abolished)
                           , nation - ooh! what a ***** word!
the left irksome sometimes uses it:
in theory: the nation-state...
                        and then there's the resurgence of
ancient Greece... in a sing-along:
maybe 'cos i'm a Londoner... brother! brother!
Athenian! Athenian!
                                       but we are born into
a Spartan wedlock... no one really bothers to
**** our gob with Shakespeare...
    then again that is the schizophrenia (alias
dualism) in humanity... thus, to be frank,
psychiatry can be congratulated, it has provided
one useful term... and i will use it, over and over again,
in a non-symptomatic way, because, i find,
it stands, as if the Olympic Graeae (Zeus, Poseidon
and Hades) eating the carcass of some inhabitant
of Tartarus...
                               evidently: tartar steak...
doubly evident: tartars, or the remnants of mongols,
settled in crimea, and elsewhere in the Ukraine...
   tartar                      tra-ta-ta-ta... ku ku ryku!
a ja fu! krecha! a ja znow... fu!       radowitą
uprzejmość... skłaniam...  
    or what i call: rising spontaneously from the depths...
polymaths applauded, the tribunal resides in
bilingualism... trenches... history... perspectives
and current affairs... wicker man media...
                        so... an example of pedantry?
ó....               that's an orthographic dignitary -
        an aesthetic muddle... as is
c-ha                               contending with samo-ha...
     ch                            came from antagonism of
cz                                   which was later antagonised
by č               in česka.... say that: hen party
bound to Prague... in the Czech republic...
                                          ch      k..­.
i am, quiet frankly... standing at the feet of the tower
of babel... and i'm looking up, and i see
correlations, and i see decimal marks,
which, when given enough geography,
can seem like England and the isles,
       and central Europe...
    Iberia? phantom of Seneca...
  eureka! let's begin, once again...
  why is there a continuum beginning with
Plato and Aristotle?
                                           we could become
reasonable people... told to deal with madmen...
we could claim beginnings with Seneca...
and Cicero...
                      and why? the Romans loved poetry...
the Greeks antagonised Homer...
            the Romans loved Horace, Virgil,
                           Ovid... perhaps we should really forget
beginning with Plato and Aristotle...
       the former has become a church,
the latter a dentist's assistant (minus the ancients'
concept of a joke).
                      evidently i have to finish off reading
Seneca... his educational letters to Lucilius....
      moralising ******* that he was, thus, perhaps
a nibble at Cicero? but i must say:
                           it has to begin somewhere,
so not necessarily in stale-bread Athens...
                      and having such perspectives helps
in claiming casual conversation?
   assuredly - if it doesn't involve talking about
the weather...
                                which is always a great mystery
   if it's given enough aurora.
   onto the mystery of dialectics,
as discovered by Alfred Jarry in his Faustroll
Pataphysics contraband...
                                                nag­ging agreement...
nodding without approval... (chapter 10) -
beginning with αληθη λεγεις εφη
        (you speak the truth, he replies) -
   and ending with ως δoκεì
                              (how true that seems)...
and then some dub-step...
        know nothing dROP! boom! jiggy jiggy,
get the rhythm.
   as i always find it hard to look at
    diacritical arithmetic...
                                  given the following
represent a prolonging: hangman:
       å, ā and ä...
                             esp. in Finnish -
stratum: hedningarna täss on nainen.
                        rolling yarn, plateau, two dips;
and i will never say something profound...
i'll just say something no one else has said,
benefit of the doubt? somewhere, someone,
                                      kneels at the same altar.
  such are the distinction - invaders from the
north, and invaders from the south...
                                           even with
crusading Golgotha mann -
the times? many bats, supers, spiders,
but not enough readings of thomas mann...
                              easily befallen into prune-nosed
high-airs... it comes with the diet of literature...
   unfortunately.
                              and with yet another book:
i have burried yet another living person
i could have had a beer with, and conversed.
it always happens, every time i read a book
i have to attend a funeral... by reading a book
i have burried someone alive...
                          shame, in all frankness...
    i will sit in a congested train, touch a breathing
body, and consecrate the touch with
a warring genuflect - harbringer of a Teutonic
passion for initiation: a komtur's slap across the cheek.
   chequers played with passions...
           and some have to be approached like
caged animals, their vocabulary as cages,
                and the whole world before them:
cageless!
             some have indeed become so encrusted in
their daily: routine, that it would take a zoologist
(thrice oh, begs some sort of diacritical marking)
rather than a psychologist to understand them...
    like the darting dupes they are, enshrined in
20% gratis! smile! have a nice day! boxing day sales!
all but pleasantries, fathoming the grave.
   stiff vocab and all other kinds of perfume...
                           a king and his charlatan knights,
who are merely ditto-heads.
                  and not of this world, afresh -
among the nimble hands prior to birth -
surely there is: more grandeour in birth
   that entry via a ******...
                            the greatest pain of ****...
and when the ancient treaty was signed
under the name: Augustus Cesarean - or
recommended for a need of aristocracy -
    it was, for a time, the mana magnetism:
and such was the rule of poetry:
rather than a crown, donned the laurel leaves...
donned the laurel leaves...
    and such was the covenant from ancient
foes when trying to assimilate the Jew...
three kings from Babylon,
                         the child in Egypt...
          no good tides from Nazareth...
         a crown of myrrh - later overshadowed
by dogmatic sprechen, simpler: thorns...
yella things... or rzepak, Essex is filled with it...
rzepak... so why bother adding a dot above
the z, when you get capricious and use rz to
denote the same?! thus a science:
voiced retroflex fricative... Stalingrad!
                       can you really stomach this kind
of jargon? if it wasn't for science fiction:
science would be twice removed from gott ist tot,
*******' worth of pondering, given the close
proximity rhyme... nothing that rhymes should
ever be taken seriously, it should be hymnal!
                         Horatio! mein lyre!
   mein Guinness leier! rabbi krähe -
     and they deem that ****** white when talking:
thinking? i'd prefer Cezanne in real life -
   maggot wriggling and all...
                                          as much eroticism
as bound to a dog slobbering its testicles:
which means ****-all in an almighty stance
   for a dollop of halleluyah in Nepal.
well: pretty talk, pretty pretty pretty: i feel pretty,
oh so butter-fly-e.
                                    2 week stance,
***** in autumn... but so many Swiss hues
coming from the same concentration of decay!
shweet!  zeit-ser!        and that's me talking
kindergarten german: innovation begins with
a fork and a spoon, should the tongue come to it...
            i see a poem,
i see something worth bugging... c.i.a.,
f.b.i., hannibal's lecture in Florence, Venice for
the rats... bugging... shoving...
  shovelling... necro grounding, rattling...
    windy via north... Icelandic...
drums along incisors of abstract gallop:
violins... fringes of the mustang... airy airy...
all regresses toward the Vulgate...
         like ****, like said, and the only pristine
stress comes with vanilla ice-cream,
or a medium-rare beef ****! hmph!
                         fa fa fa excesses with that hurling
puff...
                      and i did finish Kant's
critique of pure reason... minus two calendars...
but, so help me god, the 2nd volume was hiding
under some corner...
                           thus, from transcendental methodology
came plump apricots, plums and pears...
             sweet decay fruit baron...
              and it's called sugars in the intricacy of pulp...
lazily grown, dangling on that caricature of
a formerly known: full crop of wheat-crude fringe.
    2 years... honest to god!
         but so many books in between...
i was given a recommendation...
i cited it already... kraszewski's magnum opus...
29 books...
                       although that's history fictionalised...
but nonetheless, it really was about
     the cossack uprising in the 17th century...
   and it was, as i once said, something i can forgive
sienkiewicz - the film version,
as in: i will not read a book once it has been adapted
to a movie... it's self-evident that too many
people have read a piece of work and are gagging
for a conversation... but where's the playground?
           ******* cherades!
  chinese whispers and a Manchurian candidate!
  i thought as much.
                          and whenever it's not a preplaned
escapade, what becomes of the day?
     was it always about a stance for carpe diem?
  syllables: di                em.
                            carpe is said with more lubricant.
corpus diem. well, that's an alternative, however
you care to think about it.
                and whenever you care to think about,
the proof is there: mishandling misnomers:
poets as tattoo artists... although no one sees the ink,
signatures on a reader's brian (purposively altered,
toward a Michael Jackon he-he, and other:
albino castratos the church venerates!)...
   that's 3 weeks in a catholic country...
  3 weeks... if only the football was better,
      i'd be called Juan Sanchez...
               but, evidently, the football is bad...
     so it's catholicism on par with a sleeping inquisition...
no one really expected Monty Python to conjure
that one... because it never really took place,
not until a trans-generational exodus
postscript 2004... once western brothels were exhausted,
and the Arab started ******* a hippo...
              then it was all about lakes and rivers
and Las Vegas 2.0 in Dubai!
                     you say quack... i say:
                                                    easy target.
and they did receive a blessing from Allah...
enough ink to write out Dante's revision of the Koran,
and some Al-Sha'ke'pir to write a play called:
the Merchant of Mecca.
  last time i heard, when the reformation was
plauging Christendom, no one invited the Arabs...
these days i think the little Lutherans of Islam
watched too many historical movies...
me? pick up a crucifix and march to Jerusalem?
  and is that going to translate into:
   blame the populists! blame the nationalists!
it's like watching a circus... why is the Islamic
reformation asking for third party associates?
                  i was happy listening to
the klinik... albums: eat your heart out...
time + plague...
                             once again: the world narrative
gags for enough people to conjure up
     a placebo solipsism... and that's placebo
with a squiggly prefix (meaning? how far
that ambiguity will take you) - ~placebo...
well: since existentialists were bores...
it's about time to head for Scandinavia
   and ask: is that " ''                 for passing on
an inheritance, or better still: ripe for
acknowledging ambiguity?
                          and if you can shove this
  into your daily narrative... you better be
a connaisseur of chinese antiques...
                frailty... then again, theres: ******;
well hell yeah *****'h, it's a murky underwold
after all.
                     and yes: that's called a petting word...
some say hombre, and we'll all be amigos
and muskateers at the end of the story.
                                    finally... i feel like i'm writing
a poem that i'll never end...
              why? it was supposed to be about
how John Casimir of Sweden championed
  the crown away from his brother Prince Charles
(volume 1)...
                      the bishop of Breslau...
a recluse... couldn't ride a horse...
    then again: nothing worthy imitation...
beginning with a donkey...
                               the transfiguration of palms
into whips... 2000 years later
talk of Hercules is madness... that other bit?
complete sanity.
                              well... if that be the case...
the book is there... i signed it, 2nd volume of
Kant's critique...
  
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        an oak... in a forest of pine...
an oak in pine wood...

then onto the wood of sighs:

aH aH aH aH aH aH aH aH
aH aH aH aH aH aH aH aH
aH aH aH aH aH aH aH aH
aH aH aH aH aH aH aH aH
aH aH aH aH aH aH aH aH
aH aH aH aH aH aH aH aH
aH aH aH aH aH aH aH aH
          (somehow the surd escapes,
and later morphs into, but prior to)

a short script: variation on MW...

      pears' worth of blunting runes:
opulance s and ᛋ - versus z,
    congregation minor: the interchange, ß,
buttocks and *****, minus phantoms of erotica.
yet, taking into account trigonometry...
sine (genesis 0), and cosine (genesis 1),
or            M                                   W
(no Jew would dare believe the Latins have
the second 'alf of the proof: that loophole of all
things qab-cannibal-mystic - cravat donning
mystique - a flit's worth of sharpening,
or dental grit... flappy tongue,
flabby oyster, lazing for a crab's palette)...
so?

1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0
1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0
1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0
1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0
1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0
1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0
1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0

of course there's an
Classy J Jan 2015
Oh Hamlet, what a troubled life you had in the end
How cruel, How sad, How fast was your life
I still can't believe you are gone, my dear lord and friend
You bravely avenged your father and this kingdom's honour
To be or not to be, noble Hamlet our friendship was like honey to bee's
Oh my wretched soul, does ache for your quick dismissal
I don't know how your true self stayed sane in all the insanity
Your story shall live on through time, that this deed may not come again
You were like a brother to me and I to you
May your soul find heaven along with your great father
It hurts to much to say goodbye, so for now adieu till I see thee again.
Donall Dempsey Dec 2016
AHHHH HORATIO I HARDLY KNEW YA!

me stuck up in the air
somewhere in oh I don't know
'63 or '64

Nelson on his pillars
chatting to a sea gull
all Dublin spread before us

like a living map
shops like tiny boxes
people like full stops

166 or was it 168
steps for 6 old pennies
panting for the view

here be the Wicklow Mts.,
there the Mournes
seeing how a bird sees

over there there's rain
though there's no rain here
everything crystal clear

all this of course
before the statue got itself
blown up

just in time for
the anniversary of
the Easter Rising

Nelson nothing now
but a pile of rubble
brought down to street level

his head stolen
by persons unknown
a ballad where Nelson once stood

"Up went Nelson
in auld Dublin!"
me forever stuck up in the air
Julie Grenness Nov 2015
It was only a legend, my dears,
A normal town, living in fear,
There were fat feral urban virgins here,
Hell bent on their pleasures, cheers!
"Down with boys' daks, get here!"
A whole town living in fear,
Was it all an urban myth, my dears?
Urban virgins strolling the streets,
Battleships waiting for boys to meet,
Immaculate conception, each miss,
Having divine parthogenesis,
Yes, real fat funster chicks,
It was all about *******,
For each little Horatio,
Or was it a fantasy of bliss,
From an  urban ****** miss?
Did urban virgins wander away?
Normal town, not a normal day,
A normal town, living in fear...
It was an urban legend, my dears.
Bit of an urban myth, harmless fun. Feedback welcome.
Beanie Baby Feb 2014
Behind the double oak doors at 71 Horatio Street, lower west side, there’s a pink striped hallway with a checkerboard floor. Up the stairs to the right there’s a corner bathroom with a drip in the whitewashed stucco ceiling that will start when you take a long shower upstairs. The window has rusty bars over it and looks out over a backyard made of brick, with potted plants. Past the corner bathroom there’s an apartment with long rooms and creamy walls. This was my house,, but across the apartment, past the corner bathroom, through the striped hallway, and down the stairs to the left was the entrance to my home.
**** and Liz Merryman to this day live in the bottom apartment at 71 Horatio Street, lower west side. Between each spindle on the carpeted staircase down is a wind up toy from ****’s antique collection. They still work, but my sister and I may be the only kids that he’s ever let touch them. Beneath the staircase is a jar of butterscotch that magically refills whenever someone takes one, or five, or sometimes even ten.. The living room in their house is where all the living goes on. The kitchen is in the living room, recipe’s hanging from the ceiling on bit’s of faded cardstock or stationary. The dining area is tucked between the spice jar and the bookcase,  a glass coffee table from which **** and Liz have eaten their way through thirty years of marriage. Out the sliding door is the brick backyard. If you sit on the faded stones and watch the unrestricted ivy wrapping around the potted fruit trees you can almost imagine you are in London, and that under the brick there is real soil not a subway station. I paddled my way through childhood in that backyard on 71 Horatio Street, lower west side, and if I cried when I left New York City, I cried for **** and Liz, and the apartment at the bottom of the stairs.

— The End —