there
there is a raven
in my grave head,
a coal black raven
sings to the dead;
passed on memories
of gone ghosts lost
now raw croaks
of desert-throated bird
pecking up the past
to sing in Tom Waits’ voice
dragging the depths
for old corpses

I could scratch and tear
at this deep despair
but the sunset inside
keeps bleeding shadows
stretched ‘cross my eyes
and it feels like a bruise
beneath my chest, my throat
from one pounding,
pounding against prison bars
ceaseless, ever-present…
a swimming grief
for no good reason
that never sees a rise

“I never know how to take the assurances (and remonstrances) I receive from Shakespeare’s current critics, who tell me that Falstaff, Hamlet, Rosalind, Cleopatra, and Iago are roles for actors and actresses but not “real people”. Impressed as I (sometimes) am by these admonitions, I struggle always with the palpable evidence that my chastisers not only are rather less interesting than Falstaff and Cleopatra, but are also less persuasively alive than Shakespearean figures, who are (to steal from Ben Jonson) “rammed with life”.”

“If your Falstaff is a roistering coward, a wastrel confidence man, an uncourted jester to Prince Hal, well, then, we know something of you, but we know no more about Falstaff.”

– Harold Bloom, Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human

This quote alone should convince you of the brilliance of Bloom who no doubt would say he is simply a mirror reflecting the brilliance of Shakespeare.

atoms in the hammered copper
hung high and brazen above my head
we’re blasted from unknown stars
many billions of buried years ago
and mine too come from the stellar;
but I am a soul’d creature
born of willful words
to return one day
to the forge i was fired in
and made into something new

there is no cohesion in this head
only a rainstorm of the world
that was and is and may be
like some beautiful television static
waiting for a narrative to form
and sing forth with a chorus of voices
telling my storied lives as one

I am in infant-time
and still lost in the fog of birth
while journeying five and light
in a bliss of oblivion
and am also 12 and burning
in a new fire raging inside
giving new sight while losing old
blind to the past but seeing
a million years ahead
as I am 25 and around the world
with a mind for a camera
to capture desert and RKO
on the same inside hard-drive

all of these and me in the now
is who I am all the time
waiting at the window to welcome
the many me’s journeying
toward my door

this once so glowing
bright filament of vibrant light,
this so former dancing, lively sprite
was now wrapped in the fat of life
and pulled deep into the mud of past
having forgotten how to dance,
while still some sliver of sun
could lift them back to the skies
in a spinning majesty
but for the un-parted clouds

from the dying mind,
from the buried and decaying;
a fertile ground is consummated
giving rise to ghosts of thought
and the spirits of ideas –
for something has to end
for the beginning to begin

it is the way of art,
it is the way of life

your messages – they’re being read,
they’re the black sheets covering your own bed,
the twisted ropes that wrap round your head
until every desperate word that’s said is said
as every monster of your broken womb is bred
and on the winter ground they fall frozen – dead

the one who seeks to cause pain is already dead;
every nail that they drive is a hook through their own eye
tearing blood tears to the earth where sorrows are sown
one hopeless, selfish, vengeful act at a time