In the creator’s brutal universe,
gentle exceptions seem abnormal.
I dwell on the fate of my departed friends,
live out their love affairs in my imagination,
bolt away when I hear their steps behind me —
the dead shouldn’t engage in my game.
My shiny hair is tied back in a ponytail,
theirs is unkempt and decayed.
They try to invent
ways to be heard and revenged,
but I am uncommitted and detached,
now trying on their fates in my mental fitting room.
Nothing mysterious under the veneer of humans.
Prince Hamlet isn’t the only one
who speaks with his father’s ghost;
ghosts camp in my overheated head in the night,
complain, whine, and demand revenge.
I put a lot of stock in ghosts’ sermons,
but see no practical use for their revelations.
Burdening Hamlet with his pending problem,
using his son to get even with Claudius
makes the royal ghost an unreliable authority —
I renounce such a heritage.
The tide was in, the tide is out
on the shore at Elsinore.
We are all unavenged at the end.
Our sons are unburdened,
freed from our lament.
© Helen Kanevsky, 2017
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| Prince Hamlet kills King Claudius by Gustave Moreau from Wikimedia Commons  |
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