Elsinore is Elsewhere

After the death of my father

Before the world became illegible

Convinced that the pain was selfish, small, childish

Determined to explain it nonetheless

Everyone resents the annihilation of a library of possible worlds

For chances to apologize, or explain, or remember, or imagine, or understand

Governments would fall, worlds would reinvent themselves, laws would be deleted

However, death will not let any of these wishes trounce the skeptics—they can’t be

It is not impetuous or juvenile to lament that, to struggle to accept that the story

Just ended there, with that other human’s disappearance

Knowing that you cannot add, or subtract, revise or revisit

Locates you in a territory that your map does not match

Maneuvering through a new narrative that is too familiar to be fresh

Never again will you be who you were, when the dead could still cross your path

Or call you out of the blue, or think again about that clumsy attempt to make amends

Poverty of this kind, in a country you know, under a ruler you dislike

Quickly reveals that you had better get some things sorted out, for you too are ending

Race, then, to leave some intelligible trace of yourself behind

Sluff off the aspirations and the desperation and the vanity

Take your time, mindful always of the fact that it need not be perfect, but it must be true

Understanding and being understood are all that alienates us from other forms of life

Vivaciously, unapologetically, with the smiling abandon of someone dancing naked, alone

Watch yourself: sort a set of symbols into a transparent representation of what it is like to be

X-ray your own soul and put the results on display, translated into phonemes by a phantom

You will be finished soon, and the manuscript will be tantalizingly proximal and impossible to touch

Zenith of being mortal animals is the successful conquest of silence by one, strangely familiar voice