I wait and measure while salt water flows,
Scouring palatial walls and hallways clean,
My phantasmal father, his ear blocked up,
Does not hear me as I scream out ‘perhaps’.

See the clouds above take on shapes to fear:
A young mermaid hoist upon a fish hook,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern swinging, cracked,
Players ’pon a stage telling lies for laughter.

Permit me, sir, to lapse and to relapse,
Then collect and collapse all my faculties,
A pillar of salt, watered down, neck craned,
Looking backwards to avoid the outcome
Making this a tale of nothing and myself,
Merely mad.

Permit me to pass, quintessentially,
To dust, to join hands, to jest and gambol,
To feel the abhorrence of a lipless kiss.

Dig them up, the golden lords and ladies
Unweed these gardens and plant no fresh seed,
The tapestries are rotted on the walls,
The corridors slick with the scent of the sea,
Heard in the shell that is Elsinore.

My father cried as they stopped up his ears,
And I lost all reason and rhythm.