Hamlet
Jack came from a long line of straight men.
He seemed prone to big thoughts in a small town,
How much else was wrong?
If this is what he shouldn’t be,
Then how did he become what’s not allowed
Without any conscious effort?
Did a fairy wave its magic wand?
Did he drink from a well that was cursed by witches?
Was there something odd in the sheep dip?
In the cattle barn, the ill-fitting roof tiles
Shot down solid beams of summer sun
In whose resplendent dust-flecked iridescence he’d dance
And imagine the laser flash and the subtle smile of a similar soul,
Lithe bodies contorting through the big city beats,
A glance of possibility, a look, the promise
Of love fulfilled.
Two years before they’d seen a male goat
Trying to have it off with another male goat
And the men had all laughed and said such things
And he wondered if the goat had been at the sheep dip,
The cursed well, the fairy with her wand,
Or perhaps he’d somehow passed it on, he, Jack,
The same way Janine got a splinter from the flaking paint
Of the combine harvester, the one they had to scrap,
And she had to get a tetanus.
One day, giddy perhaps on the silage,
He’d seen Jason on the neighbouring farm, shirtless,
Herding pigs in the summer sun, he couldn’t look away,
Jason, slapping each pig’s bum, lucky pigs,
He wanted to be with Jason, he wanted Jason’s palm
On his rump, Jason, on whom the gods had bestowed
Floppy blond hair and rippling biceps, ohh, Jason,
It made him feel dizzy, though not as dizzy as he felt
When rotating the crops, his knuckles whitened
As he gripped his binoculars,
Last summer his uncle’s prize ram, Kenneth,
Won first prize in the category Lincolnshire longhorn,
But six months before you wouldn’t have believed it,
Kenneth was a miserable specimen, a shag of a sheep,
Yet nature intervened and he transformed into
The finest woolliest puffiest fluffiest virile and thrusting ram
To ever set hoof in the ring,
Nature intervened and put things right,
And maybe this was just a phrase that he, Jack was going through,
Perhaps there might be a flash of light so blinding as to make
The cocks cock-a-doodle doo and the chickens bakurrrrrp,
And he’ll metamorphose and fall for some winsome lass
Whose coquettish charms will make him forget all about
Jason and his rippling biceps.
And settle down.
And have loads of kids.
And live a life in perpetuity
Hetereonomatively.
The rolling green fields and the warm summer breeze
Cannot calm at all Jack’s perpetual unease,
For places exist where communities thrive
In whose clamorous clasp he’d feel more than alive.
The isolation, the loneliness, the sense of forbidding,
The yearning, the heartache, the perpetual kidding
That the emotions he feels are oddly counterfeit,
A life so subdued will never feel complete.
Real lives are lived in rural parts,
Emotions are felt, the breaking of hearts.
He came from a long line of very straight men
Each generation, again and again,
And all the time came that one nagging thought:
Is he real as a person if his desires are worth nought?
Robert Garnham 