(An Erasure based upon A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II Sc. 1, Titania by Sir William Shakespeare)
Forgeries of jealousy, you creeping hags!
Haven’t you done enough to me?
Never, since the day we met in 1962,
not Christmas, nor Thanksgiving, nor Easter day,
by kitchen sink, or living room couch,
or in the vast spectrum of my life’s moments,
as I danced, and sang, and played a part too well,
but with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d my life.
Therefore the arts, calling to me in vain,
as in revenge, have suck’d up to your aging client base.
Contagious hags! Boasting on the land
your husbands’ pelting incomes made so proud
that they did overbear their lives’ expectancy.
And me? I stretch’d my yoke in vain,
losing sweat and tears, too green to see
the rotted beard of your faux nature;
so fold! Stand empty in your drowned fields,
you crows! Be fatted with another fuck;
the nine men’s folio is fill’d up with mud,
th’wives quaintly amazed by your wanton greed.
So wondrous spiced, thy graceless air is to the imps!
Wanton demons wish your winter’d souls
to eat on nights with hymn and carol blest.
My friend, the moon, the governess of floods,
pale in her anger, washes your state’s foul air,
and rots the walls of your vestiges:
what a thoroughly perfect disparaging of your lives.
These seasons, altered by whore-headed men,
dare find a fresh lap for a crimson rose
on an old man’s thin and icy wallet.
Thou odorous chaplet of discreet wicked buds!
I in mockery, set thee the spring, the summer,
the childing autumn, angry winter, charged,
you haunted criminals! And the amazed world,
who, duped as me, know not which is which.
We’ll see your progeny of evils come to jail!
You want debate? You want dissension?
I am their parent and original, by no relation to you!