Sonnet 157

Terribly bored. Terribly confused. Wondrously streaking my goose-feather quill across my page, forming letters that take no form. May words be my saving grace now, as once they had been? As once, when this, our life, found tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything? Any words I should now squeeze from nature, as blood to a stone, leave behind them a poison trail of disease and death. They would seek holes in my paper, plaguing what sour thoughts could come from this direst of worlds.

-

It has coursed a full moon's cycle since the mournful day the privy council closed the doors to my theatre.

A month of battering my mind, searching here, there, and everywhere for a play, a narrative to be told should my doors reopen ever again. But why, for what instance should they reopen if this plague is not to subside? My plays remain unplayable if not the players are able to play. A month in this room, and still I rest before a blank page, afeared of the curse of my own thoughts.

-

Time has run me defenceless, tired, turning to defeat all those around me. My sorrow cannot give words; my grief does not speak, but knits up o-er my wrought heart and bids it break. Life now is but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets upon the stage, and then is heard no more.

My son, my truth in form, what once he was in eleven years, left to me a flooded, fleeting memory. His thought drives me from sweet mercy, tripping me on nobility's true badge. His memory, a candle that blinds me from my art, that chokes me with death's rotting scent, reminding me that I am but a man. For only a month, I have been but a man.

Before, I thought I might have liked this place and could willingly waste my time in it. Yet I have wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

-

Yet how far that candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world. Time has run me defenceless, yet here I remain. Unwavering, unfleeing, a tired willingness to become what I once was. What is past is prologue. The candle prompts me to my quill. It suggests inspiration, for if the players can not play, perhaps may my words continue to entertain.

A poem of my darkened thoughts. A poem of death, of misery, of disease and exhaustion. Fourteen lines to inhabit the woes of our sorrow. Fourteen lines to immortalise those shrouded in deaths pure touch. What's done cannot be undone, and nothing can come of nothing. Hence, I must write, for my tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else concealing it will break. I must give word to my sorrow. My thought is free, and I must pay it back to those souls that are poor of such thought.

Sweet are the uses of adversary which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel on his head. Boldness be my friend. Give counsel to my words to woo the world, guide me to the harmony of death, let sing a final breath.

-

With a months unfounded motivation, my quill, so long unfamiliar with the touch of paper, scratches coarsely my final sonnet:

"

With overtones of outcast symphonies,

To heaven's gates, my pride alone shall sing,

Laughing in turn of young epiphanies,

Cursing the thought of every mortal thing.

For when I breathe once more, so let me rest,

I won't be changed for sake of timely men,

The burden of your past hides on the chest,

Of the man who grasps tightly to his pen.

But death can never come so soon enough,

I waste away my days in sedentate,

And finally, when life should call my bluff,

Leaves me in a horrid, perfect state.

And when my thoughts be cut in half by thee,

There lies the burning desire to be.

"

And once again, I am more than a man. Once again, my words will play; not on stages, but in minds. Once again, I am unshackled from my thoughts, free to write my life in sorrow and in more.

-

Once again, I am William Shakespeare.