Sonnettics

Premiere at The Tank in NYC

https://thetanknyc.org/calendar-1/gone-in-60-seconds-nyc-one-minute-theatre-festival

The Joke’s on Me
A one-minute existential play
Characters:
Ophelia – Reflective, dryly amused by her fate.
Yorick – The ever-wise fool, both guide and provocateur.
Setting:
 A liminal afterlife—vast, empty, yet oddly intimate. A single bench. Ophelia sits, wringing the water from her gown. Yorick leans against nothing in particular, grinning.

OPHELIA: Tell me, Yorick—was I mad, or was the world?

YORICK: (thoughtful) That depends. Do you prefer to be tragic or merely ridiculous?

OPHELIA: Ridiculous, I think. There’s freedom in it. Madness is such a heavy thing to carry.

YORICK: Oh, then you were utterly absurd. The prince loved you, until he didn’t. Your father shielded you, until he used you. And you, poor maid, floated prettily away—like punctuation at the end of a sentence.

OPHELIA: A comma or a period?

YORICK: An ellipsis, I think. A drowning ellipsis… trailing off mid-thought.

OPHELIA: Fitting. I always did feel unfinished. (beat) But tell me, was I real? Or just a plot device?

YORICK: Oh, real enough to drown, but not real enough to swim.

OPHELIA: (smirks) And that is the joke, isn’t it? I was shaped by everyone’s will but my own.

YORICK: (bows) The grandest absurdity of all: you were never given a choice, yet somehow, your tragedy was called inevitable.

OPHELIA: (laughs softly) And what do we call that? Fate?

YORICK: No, my dear. Theater.

Lights fade. End.

There once was some poop on the ground
It sat without making a sound
It look very fine
So I put up a sign
“Don't step on me! Please walk around.”

I saw the face of Marguerite Porete,
The mystic who beheld Divinity.
It might have been a dream, or better yet,
A vision only Seeing Eyes might see.

I wondered if she chose to thus appear
To show herself, to let herself be known.
I wondered if Divinity was near,
Or if her soul had vanished on its own.

Her gaze, a mirror burning yet serene,
Reveals a love that law cannot restrain.
A fire that stirs both absence and what's seen,
A silence singing through both loss and gain.

And in that face I glimpse the soul’s free flight,
A deathless life that shines beyond all night.

I wonder what the world will think of next
I wonder if it gives a shit at all
The world is just a word of simple text
Simplicity, the god before the fall
So now I watch and wait and wonder too
The world is more complex than what it was
The world was once simplicity I knew
So does it give a shit? Perhaps it does
Perception is the mirror we perceive
Reflecting what we think we ought to see
The blindness of humanity may grieve
To find what’s next reveals what’s meant to be
A simple couplet ends the world’s great verse
A simple wondrous rhyme. It could be worse.

The rockets tear at night above Ukraine
While Gaza burns and children choke on dust
Taiwan is warned by shadows in the rain
And treaties rot, corroded into rust.

Here in America the guns don’t sleep
They prowl through schools, through markets, through the night
Our blood is cheap, the graves are dug too deep
The headlines blur, yet never end the fight

The planet scorched, the oceans forced to rise
Refugees march where borders slam them shut
We call it peace, but peace itself now dies
A word that’s strangled, ravaged in the gut

Don’t ask what front: the front is everywhere
This war is now. It thickens in the air.

We wait like raindrops, contemplating drought
We wait, for what? The end that might begin?
To turn perceptions into certain doubt
We wait for changes, much to our chagrin
It doesn’t pay to wait for certain change
It doesn’t pay to change when we must wait
Dichotomies are nothing if not strange
It’s strange to think of all we contemplate
Then back to being raindrops in the drought
We contemplate perceptions which will change
Is this what dried up life is all about?
Is waiting thus the way the gods derange?
Deranged in waiting, everyone is god
A metaphor perceived as simply odd.

I watched her disappear in songs of smoke
I thought she’d be the one to prove them wrong
But breath is only life until you choke
And brilliance fell to shadow in her song
She moved through rooms like rumor, half-believed
A trailing laugh, a shadow at the door
I’d turn to speak, but find myself deceived
Her voice remained; her motive was impure
She danced on coals and called it poetry
Mistook the glow for grace of ashen youth
Her exit staged in careful tragedy
A burned out lie she passed off as the truth
Let smoke recall her, beautiful, unwise
A flash that sang of air and smoky lies

(This is my first attempt at a new form called a Cadralor. Featured in Gleam, Issue 9):

———-

A hand skims the surface of an old record,
dust rising like breath. The needle catches, crackles,
then the voice of a singer, younger than memory.

In a café, a woman stirs her coffee clockwise,
watching the door without meaning to,
without admitting she is waiting.

The abandoned orchard still bears fruit.
beneath a tangle of overgrown branches,
a single apple, split open hums with bees. 

Two names carved into a rail by the river, 
edges softened by years of rain. Wind runs a hand
through the reeds, whispers its question. 

At the train station, she turns at the sound of her name,
spoken as it used to be. The weight of years
is nothing; the distance, already closing. 

The quiet roar of stillness in my dream
Invites the little songs to find a voice
Like fabric finds a bordered stitch, a seam
Or finds it never really had a choice
The way that stark precarity ascends 
To other worlds above the damaged plain
I like the definition it defends
The etymology of tender pain
When little songs awaken in my heart
Then find their little way to where I write
I wonder if they end up where they start
They may not be true gods, and yet they might
They might proclaim divinity with grace
And dwell forever in a holy place.

A kilt is how we show the world we're free
From all the world's conventions, which would bind
The Highland soul and strength we seek to be
Through freeing both the body and the mind

A kilt is freedom's comfort, worn with pride
The pride of independence, bought with strength
It shows the strength of freedom born inside
That liberates the soul, at any length

The man that wears the kilt is strong and proud
Of heritage that bears his clan, his name
He speaks his words in silence, and aloud!
He knows his life is more than just a game.

And yet he knows when games are meant to be
A kilt is how he shows the world he's free!