Falstaff Riseth Up
Posters in classrooms and bars
listed synonyms for drinking:
fap, cashiered, spongy, rouse,
or terms for sex: making the beast with two backs,
or insults: you starveling, you elf-skin,
you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle.
You filthy bung. You basket-hilt stale juggler.
You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian!
Thou cream faced loon. Thou leathern-jerkin,
crystal-button, knot-pated, agatering,
puke-stocking, caddis-garter,
smooth tongue Spanish pouch.
At first, we read them with delight
then with a vague sense of diminishment.
We too drank and fucked and swore,
but with nothing like such … such …
… with nothing like…
…. goddamnit…
god…damnit….
Resentfully we mouthed our meager words,
the shreds and patches of our mother tongue.
Enter Jacques, and Lords ([like]) Foresters) [with a dead deer].
So much
has been chopped up and off
in these plays,
so much
has been lost
the editors must work
to make them coherent,
splinting and bandaging
with parentheses and parentheses
within parentheses, italics, commas,
periods, capitalization,
trying to suture closed
the ruptures.
But the prince, as he dies,
points to the void
that can’t be glossed
by language and grammar.
Iago says, “What you know,
you know.”
And Lavinia,
Lavinia says nothing.
She doesn’t even move her stumps.
Enter at the other end of the churchyard, Friar Laurence, with a lantern, crow, and spade
Look, all I’m asking is why the spade.
After all, he knows she’s in a tomb,
he fucking helped put her there.
So, maybe it’s just a cheap symbol
for the audience – “Grave Work!” –
or maybe he simply scooped up
what he could hold. But maybe,
maybe, in his haste, he has slipped
into old patterns, taking tools
he’s used before. Some say
they’ve seen lights in the cemetery
at night, that someone’s been
rooting up bones and bodies
like plants. Or maybe he suspects
he’ll find something he’ll need
to bury. I don’t know, but
if the tools make the man,
we should dig a little deeper
because something’s suspicious
about this meddling monk. Maybe
he doesn’t know what he’s doing,
but maybe, maybe, we don’t.
–Art by Milan Vopálenský & Esmahan Özkan