Narratives - April 21

"A plague on both your houses!"
Shouts Mercutio in his last dying breath.
He dies.
The scene ends,
And the actor shuffles off the stage.

"All the world's a stage."
Shakespeare observes,
Then lifts his pen to prove it,
To pave the way to today:

Today is the day when dramatic reproductions, reinventions, and reclamations rise out reverberant from throats interpolated with the history of society, from Beirut to Belfast, a canvasser on the red bricks to one man throttling one man and throwing his dreams out the window to the pavement below. From campfires to courtrooms, treaties to tribunals, the great narrative plays out, is acted while lives are lost or made. Horatio Alger made a dream that broke a generation. Henry Miller made a dream that broke a generation. Barack Obama made a dream that broke a generation. And I woke up one morning, my bedroom flooded with last night's newspaper clippings, all printed off from every source, piling high, drowning a sea of being, and my friends and my family, and my self, and my world was all composed, laid down to a track, recorded in a studio some four states away, and one man throws a punch in hopes of breaking another's neck, and one man throws a game in hopes of breaking another's losses, and the yellow stars smear golden painted when the story suddenly calls for it; and we all look up, in a moment of wonder, from our smartphones, and think, "what story am I writing here? what world am I creating by stringing words together? where am I going? what narrative will take me there?"

And I look around, amidst all the puffy eyes and broken jaws, and grin ironically saying, "all the world's a stage...you can get up now Mercutio."