Miguel Murphy

SHAKESPEARE

It’s exhausting, trying to be a person.
At Traitor’s Gate,
my cousin’s head decorates
the labyrinthine horizon.
Across the river, a mob cheers
an ape mauled by a dog
starved for sport.
I’ve heard and seen it.
A face on a spike! The opposite

of apathy, The Scavenger’s Daughter.
I think of being young.
That ornate summer.
A mechanical dolphin
lemniscates the lake
for our Queen’s Progress
at Kenilworth, 1575.
Before they pathologically whip me.
To rob Sir Thomas Lucy’s park at Charlecote

is the mistake that made me
masterless, a Lord Strange man. The rest
is purgatory. The Theater,
the Curtain, the Swan, the Rose,
Shoreditch, and the Globe.
Deer thief. Dog’s leather
of a Stratford-upon-Avon glover.
My coat of arms,
my rag.

MIGUEL MURPHY is the author most recently of Detainee. He lives in Southern California, where he teaches at Santa Monica College.