The Devil's Pleasure Garden: Homer and Shakespeare

Homer and Shakespeare

O there's nobody left to read, to read!

There's nobody left to read!

"Homer"

May be as misnomer

For several otherwise out-of-work guys

Half his size.

And can I take heart from a work by committee,

The daily battle before the invested city?

The smug gods dilute me till I'm gone,

The pale eternal coffee break on the office lawn—

I want more!

It was all spacemen anyway.

O there's nobody left to read, to read,

There's nobody left to read!

I keep the bible in the bathroom,

Chapel grotto of my steadiest meditations

Where,

Bloody lamb of my intestine's perturbations

I am likeliest reduced to prayer.

Not that I'm getting anywhere.

At least the gods were my moral inferiors,

Not having to die.

Here I am outdone even in this.

O there's nobody left to read, and I'm tee-ed,

There's nobody left to read!

But if my ego is on a par with the Savior's

By what rule of thumb shall I plot my behaviors?

How shall my thoughts and my feelings agree?

O how shall I structure my ee-ssential me?

(I guess Arnold was right there, but that's all he gave me.

There isn't a line in his poems that can save me.)

Let's move up to Shakespeare,

Reconsider that sneer

At erotic esteem,

A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

Not the romp it might seem,

And the blind bastards we're.

No anomalous fear.

It's a bitch going steady.

Or let us to the height

Of the language, King Lear,

And again get the shove,

Feel the pain all we might

Over betraying love,

About which I felt awful already.

"To be or not to be, that is the question,"

Just isn't poetry. It's indigestion.

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Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.