Where I Play King Lear

Where I Play King Lear
© Surazeus
2025 05 05

As father of three witches brewing potions 
that transform robots into human beings, 
I refuse to play King Lear in your drama, 
so I hide secrets in the cellar door 
as my mother cooks cornbread and spaghetti 
while ghosts of our ancestors haunt the house. 

If I knock on the door of every house 
in the whole world to find where my soulmate 
builds furniture from bones of faceless gods, 
I will keep searching disappearing streets 
with bold bewildered confidence of love 
by asking the ocean forbidden questions. 

While I strum guitar in the city square 
beneath orange eerie sky of burning clouds, 
my eyes grow huge as ninety thousand moons 
with thousand-mile stare of epiphany 
at shocking satori of naked truth 
I want to kill men who hurt other people. 

Appalled at dark gloom of the Upper World, 
Persephone breaks open fruit of knowledge 
so we can suck sweet pomegranate juice 
to taste intense disgust of pleasant death 
that proves we are alive with half-blind faith 
in how our love may generate new life. 

We die unto sweet misery of desire 
with fraught conception of fertile regret 
for lust that drives us mad with honest hope 
that we can build cute paradise of peace 
where every person gets all they deserve 
as solemn reward for mute suffering. 

Shrinking back into wrinkled serpent egg 
of childhood trauma, buried in foul mud, 
we shout at stormclouds drenching time in tears 
that quench not thirst for arrogant revenge 
as if fair justice will always be served 
to those who break the beauty we create. 

Intense respect for how Death knows our names 
inspires our daughters to crawl from the Earth 
and dance with fierce attention to details 
for moral platitudes we share with frowns 
around the crackling fire of old tradition 
which burns down everything we think is true. 

With passion to transform the bleak waste land 
into lush Wonderland of fruitful trees, 
where every person born from Stone of Thought 
knows why we wingless angels cannot fly, 
we gather at the river in moonlight 
where I play King Lear till the end of time.