What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones, The labor of an age in pilèd stones,

Siete blasted aluminum bat into your brethren’s skull— the sound like slapped down dominoes. You reigned that summer, Rat

splash quite unnoticed

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

Forgetting our bodies, their pitiful limbs, their heaviness.

A man sits mournful,     his mind in darkness, so daunted in spirit     he deems himself ever after     fated to endure.

Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat, Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat, Select the prince from a row of identical masks, Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote, Or learn the phone directory by rote.

I have the fervour of myself for a presence and my own spirit for light; and my spirit with its loss

And once Doubt ruptured the web, All manner of demon thoughts

the sun shone As it had to

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.