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

Violence. It's said to be an act of destruction,
destroying things depending not on if they deserve to die,
But I, with my life in one eye,
And my conscience in the other I cannot see way another to create, for by
Viewing my life vicariously while viciously vying I'm lying more like biding my time until my untimely demise showing  how softly for an answer we cry
Lying to ourselves and reaching out to the rich in a restriction of our dignity, yes I
Am ashamed of my actions and an answer to my arrogance found have I not, yet by and by
My desire to die is drowned down by the deficit of desire in my heart, hearing not my heated hurting reverence, at the end of this sentence, nothing may seem awry.
However my senses are wearing closer to nothing,
My spine is not detecting, and find I not comforting
The gentle sweep of your hand on my skin, sin brewing within me, seeing and saving my heart from my eyes a time
Of trying, yes, I see it, a life that could've been mine,
Through fault of my own my thoughts fall towards home,
Barely living in a beginning of ending my own.



As time tells me nay, not my nights filled to the brink within me I say
Give me my gentle, my generous, my grieving over my great mistake, yet away
Are my kin, although heaven may not thee, the actions of they
Compared to those of my own, their intention grown not from the seed of dismay,
Yet dismay they convey.
My tears mimic fears from my earliest day
A shrew of hatred shoots through my eye as I sigh to my side in an intake, I cry, "just send me away".
I don't know how often my soul's shrieks are heard, through the night of my consciences cracked walls, my skin sits undeterred, yet anyway
I feel less than adequate, of course, worthless and wondering through my tinted eyes remorse, but try still I may.
The ravens black wing will not withdraw my patience or wither one's restlessness, for on another day
My brother live would be, my conscience clean would be, my wife not mine would be, as a vision of which of they
Survive me could, if pieces fit as they fall away in my chords of chaos dismembering my dismay.

Dearest Ophelia:
Daughter of the murdered man
Sister of the murdered man
Lover the man who murdered your men
This is an ode to your fictitious life

Ophelia, my love, you are divine
Oceanic and loving, you are the blessed petals
Of a plucked flower in hopes of a fortune

Irrational, eccentric,
Your whims
Become the whims of others

The ickle darling
Who needs help most
Dying a death so jarring

Sinking, sinking, thinking
Into the murky depths unknown
By the Queen’s words not shown

By rue,
By rosemary,
By fennel,
By *****,
By columbine,

By regret,
By remembrance,
By foolishness, flattery, and adultery,
By love,
By faith and hope

Her judgement most bitter-hearted
Her judgement most secretive and dry
Her judgement most sweet-scented

Lost to a fit of laughter
By the maiden’s wit
Her act comes to a close
With mermaid-like prose

I. The Funeral



Take the rosemary

they have pressed between my toes

and use it to garnish

your next glass of wine.

As you drink

make a toast,

not to merriment,

but to lamentation–

to the remembrance

of thy maiden’s death.



Cheers! to the unity

of our most unwavering

disgrace.



Cheers to what

has been broken.



In a fit of maddening remorse–

for this time the madness shall be tangible–

tear away the silk

lining of this

****** funeral bed

like you did tear

away the curtain and what

hid behind it.



Tear it away!



Tear it away like you did

tear the rat,

like you did tear and discard

the honour that did lie

between thy maiden’s legs,

like the river’s rapids

did tear away thy maiden’s life.



And once you have

sheathed your sword–

I entreat you–

kneel and bow your head

in surrender to the lilies

that lie before my grave;

you will caress their stems

and kiss their petals

in the hopes that

your love–the love

you did deny me–

will breathe life back

into these water-logged lungs.



But just as it is certain

that the flowers,

in their cyclical phases

of nature,

must bloom,

it is also certain that the dead

must remain dead.



For there is nothing so definite

as the blooming

just as there is nothing so definite

as the dying.



–Post Madness



II. The Drowning



My gown billows around

me like the slick

ripple of a mermaid’s fin.



I can hear the Lady Siren’s Song

and all of its guarantees:

liberation of this life’s

betrayals and heartbreaks,

liberation procured

by the certainty of death.



I **** the nectar of her voice,

drinking in every crescendo–

every last staccato–

of what the water has

promised me.

I **** the nectar of her voice

as I had so foolishly

suckt at the honey of his

music vows,

the same way

his own babe would

have suckt the milk

from the swell of my breast–

my babe to be

that shall never be

drowned by my sodden womb,

my babe whose mother–

certain in what proved to be

the uncertainty

of her lord’s love–

conceived him

in a bed of sin,

a bed of dishonour.



So now, my sweet child,

I do not object

to the deluge that

threatens to drag us

beneath the current,

for perhaps

this is the only way

to put the dishonour

to rest.



So float with me,

my sweet nymph,

and let us both dissolve

into spirits of the river.



–The Pinnacle of Madness



III. The Heartbreak



I, A maid at your window,

mouth glittering in anticipation

for your sweet, valentined kiss.



To the celestial and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia…



And so up you rose

to unlatch the chamber door–

to meet the nestle of

soft, petaled lips.



Doubt thou the stars are fire,



Doublet unbraced,

you undressed

and to this, My Lord, I

so willingly followed.



Doubt that the sun doth move,



Corset loosened and

gown discarded

with you, I did lie.



Doubt truth be a liar,



So certain I was of your love,

that sin no longer daunted me.



But never doubt I love.



And certainly I was proven wrong,

for in the escapade of our passion

we did touch so dishonourably.



–Pre-Madness (The Inciting Incident)

I will dance at night
Bats sing a dark, Hamlet song
Shadows make great leads

there is something powerful about holding
a pen in your hand and writing down
all of the things that you know
and that you
don’t

so my tearstains litter the page like petals
falling from my pen
because my eyes have lost their caring long ago
I’m not sure when
but at some point being okay
became more important than being alive so

I don’t really cry anymore. can’t.
sometimes I know that I should but
the tears don’t come and I feel
a little less than human

but this is how i love myself:
honest ink tracing words of the heart
words that hold my essence better than i ever could
words that voice my joy and my hope and my anguish
words
words
words

It almost feels as though,
if I hold the words to my throat, the heat of my blood
will transfer itself through paper--through intentions--
until it rouses tragedy and plucks the frost from
each delicately chosen word.

It almost feels as though,
if I cradle him in my thoughts, the boy will learn what I already know
and run before history catches up with him.
He will run and cry out his grief and his fear and he will escape his spies, his responsibility, his head, his conscience, his ties, his ghost, his guilt.

But no man--no, boy--can outrun a demise like this when
he's tripping on the roots of the family tree and failure
has taken his father, his mother, his friends, his affection.

The only person helping him stand back up is merely a messenger.

Cast thy nighted color off,
sweet prince of Denmark.
Breathe once in
the warmth of my heart before a colder kind of
messenger comes to carry you away, no longer a son of any sort.

Or are you still?

with Apollo forgotten and filtered through
dangling leaves of willows and waterlogged flowers
bunches of peonies and rosemary
some red in there too (all the better for the boy's deed)
she floats on water
and cannot remember how to feel the sun
or how to be tender
with this much blood in her mouth