Shadow shapes from Helsingor

 

On the point of a needle, 

Hamlet's sad ghost lives

 and is forced to exist.

 Across Elsinore, 

Hyena winds tear his clothes,

 rattling wildly. 

Better would it be to go to the dry

 desert of the Ninevehs,

 seen by the sand-grains,

 than to destroy the nimbus

 of the uncovered daily.

Our bad dreams are always with us.

 To walk the treadmill of bumpy donkey-ladder

 careers in the footsteps

 of opportunists and profiteers.

 A secret-keeper is seldom

 if ever the setting,

 horizon-orbiting star.

 Years from now the aged 

executioner will wrap his

 murder-rope around his stiffened neck.

Splintering piles of bone-skulls

 now coil everywhere.

 Their open, sinister poisons

 drip down to open hearts

 the vicious juices of secret vials.

 Yorick's hollow teeth with the careful

 precision of the great gravediggers,

 a few sharply thrust.

Truth will be rewarded when

 new and more exotic Ophelia dare

 to commit suicide under the weight

 of their sorrows. 

On chains of bonded thieves,

 Polonians will cower

 with blind acquiescence.

 It is long since Hamlet will peep

 behind the curtains

 of veiled curtains without seeing

 the carcasses of sacrificial corpses.

To escape from the guilt

 of responsibilities unnoticed,

 it is too late, it is feared. 

With its fetid, sulphurous stench, 

it would be better

 if all the little unrepentant

 little Klaudius kings were to run away.

Hamlet himself is already consoled

 by the fact that he always has to see something.

 On vertical paths the loops of time

 are cut by history.

 But his shadowy figures wander incessantly...