To be or not to be. That is the question.
It has come to my attention
that the winds have stopped blowing.
The kingdom does not need them anymore
to hide its blasphemous ways.
They float with a heavy silence past the floors, past the peasants, past the cemeteries, past my grave and from the creaks of the castle’s doors.

King Hamlet never celebrated silence.
Never embraced it as a friend, claimed it masculine.
A true leader was to speak his mind and speak it often.
And yet this heavy silence falls uniform and soothing to the kingdom’s thoughts.

It has come to my understanding that a kingdom needs silence to maintain to their senses.
A man needs silence to come back to their senses.
A castle so loud leaves no space for reflection, for sanity.
No space for intellectualism and personality.
A castle so loud only leaves the kingdom to join its loudness --while whispering their own biased sounds under the tables.
Funny how easy it is to wake up when a room falls to silence abruptly.
As if such silence holds a density powerful and altering.

Such silence holds heavy gravity around such king.
A gravity of dominance and security.
A gravity my dad gained from fighting and negotiating,
and my dead uncle-father from betraying and impersonating.
--I heard the grave diggers cuss at not being able to bury me like the others. They’ll have to wait some decades until they can dig up my skull.

To be or not to be. That is the question.
To die, to sleep.
But in sleep we shall not end.
My sleep is splattered with droplets of red and distant satisfaction.
And in sleep we shan’t dream.
Because dreaming is what we do
To convince ourselves we are the living.
But when we die,
for once,
we become sure we are not.

I’ve visited Ophelia’s swamp on stumbling mornings.
And my eyes have claimed her making flower crowns in that mossy rock of hers by the edge of the water.
Crowns whose flowers are meant for no one but herself.
Her eyes, sure and used,
but her mind flutters--
Has forgotten what it’s supposed to hold on to.
And I wonder if our death isn’t destined.
Meant to mend who we are while living.
I remember how she floated through life.
The currents she allowed to take her before finding a safe way to sink.

Because I see her, so engulfed in the world she’s created,
she’s forgotten the one she chose to leave behind.
And in her sleep her eyes float in effervescence
while her mind forever sinks in exasperation.

I’ve often tried to picture myself in that floating muffled sleep of hers,
wondered if that would link my world to hers,
but the red in my sleep
is too light and too opinion struck
to sink in the silent peaceful rhythms of her swamp’s waters.