Stop bashing me with that shillelagh
Said the brazen dancer with a rose in her teeth
The foils the ingenues were wrapping up the audition
While the administrator burst through the pasteboard set

O for the house that Jack rebuilt
O for an age so sheltered from annoy

You just can’t do that the dancer continued
I say that like you know what I’m talking about
And when she said that she wasn’t talking about
A stroke from a cudgel a walking stick
Or any other blunt instrument
I don’t know what she was talking about
It just seems people don’t talk that way any more
I just don’t know

The photo on the drivers license was a poor likeness
I say the because I refer to a definite image a definite document
More definite than the famous dish the fabled spoon
And that likeness as I say was a poor one
In that the sitter looks more hostile more fatigued and disheveled
Than ever in life
Oh sure the identifying features were there
Though they would be easy enough to fake
The eyes and hair of average color
The white and bristly beard

Don’t do me any favors I hear you cry
You’ve got to believe
I beg you to believe that none of this
Has gone according to plan
O for some object something real
Like a tiger and not the image of a tiger
And not the photograph of a plush toy tiger
Though the image might be a real image
And I know you don’t know what I mean by this
I don’t know but I can definitely say
Oh the difference to me

Or we few we happy few
Or conceived in liberty
That’s a weird one how do you conceive in something
The Lincoln quote I mean
Is the one that is weird

The director set the warm remnant
Of a canned beverage on the table
And disparaged the reading of Shakespeare
In the National Geographic
Especially in a room like this one
With its low ceiling and fluorescent tubes behind frosted plastic
And gazing grimly across at the shadowy crowd
Especially in a room like this one

My little brother who is taller than me
Said quite a number of years ago he believes in ghosts
And I’m sure at that time he thought he believed that ghosts exist
I wish him the best of luck with them
Assuming he still holds that belief
About ghosts I mean
I love my brother and our dead parents
Who weren’t yet dead when he said that thing about ghosts

But why does it always have to start with violence
Or end up there
Or touch upon violence somewhere in the middle
If someone were really bashing her the dancer I mean
Surely she would have protested more vigorously
I guess she was speaking through clenched teeth
But she could have just spat the rose out

And conflict is the soul of drama
And violence is the emblem of conflict
And in (a) play we configure the intractable world to ourselves
More pixellated turn-based RPG than mirror
We that is who have the DNA of homo sapiens
My memory seems to be entirely short term
And seem always seems to precede be
And there’s the emperor and then there’s me