Ophelia's Repose {original poetry}

{Original poem read by the author, Jess Genevieve Bailey.
All rights to text and voice audio reserved.}

OPHELIA'S REPOSE

I am long drowned and over drenched, my lord
I have ebbed away here in the first budding of the fresh season
This receding that begun as I began
Is completing itself, completing me.

I lay in the parched seabed's upward thrust
I have placed heavy stones in my silk stitched pockets
The threads are slowly breaking
My veins are following, following their brittle cue
A percussive music to the long legged water bugs, a beetle listens too
This blood on water - like Rothko on the gray walls.

In death I am unfairly wakening, my lord
Your Ophelia cannot sleep a dreamless dream
Sans eye my eyes do see
Sans taste my lips do kiss
- Kiss, ah the tender inward of they palm!
Sans sense my body aches

But see, my lord? Oh see?
I am not so unnatural in all this
Sans edges the earth draws lines in her sky
Sans life the stars do shine - Giving us their ghosts! Freely, freely.
Sans fact, fiction produces truths.


For I am but a living fiction sweetly dreamt, my lord
I languish and wade along your riverbanks.
(You are not my star. I am not your city.)
A fiction lived and dreamt.
And in so dreamt, alive!
And in so living such a death
Finding a sweet slumbering sleep
Of awakening breaths.

Do not say "She was so full of life," my lord
For I never was my lord -- full of life -- this life assured,
I was always going, leaving as I came -- being poured out, and pouring out life.
Had already gone when you begged me to stay.

For I am mad my lord!
Quite ravished with this living!
Over drenched with this breathing!
Oh drowned, my lord
I am drowned and long gone before
And coming again after to leave watermarks on your hard wood floor.



I am quite convinced we live like this
Everything having already occurred and everything
Yet to be comprehended.


* * *

Music by Andrew Bird
Painting by James Whistler

Text of poem also found at www.ladydurerstypewriter.blogspot.com

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Jess Genevieve Bailey
• act word song acting stage

[LiterateGal]

Beautifully written. Some iambic pentameter, some free-verse, much like Hamlet's own discourse. I love how you wove the words from the play into your verse. Kudos!!

[30inventionman]

who painting that

[keepcalmycarryon]

I applaud your anemic attempt at what I can only faintly discern (and dubitatively) to be "prose." I will pass this on to the proprietor of my local cornershop, in hopes that he will play your work in place of the usual Tajik folk music or what-have-you. (I only frequent that establish to gather research on the behavior of the hoi polloi, mind you.)

Good day.

(C) 2011 brighton dechienne All Rights Reserved