Marlowe’s Season
“…the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud
ever practiced on a patient world.” Henry James
I
My voice is not my voice, my words must play
in lines that hint, but do not say that I
am here behind a name that never may
reveal a source beyond a self. Why
season such a plight with bitter tones when
no ear remains attuned to them at all?
I write my sorrows for a future when
perhaps an unborn ear might heed a call
to look within the clues that I have placed
with careful consideration of my
state. I leave terms so light and lightly traced
that great illumination, not the eye,
is needed to detect what they’d convict.
Myself I occlude, while my words restrict.
II
I am a shadow, nothing more than that.
I hold no substance, I show no face, I
do not exist except through another
steeped in the light that used to shine on what
was once myself. I can be myself by
myself, but not by any other. Were
the world to become enlightened as to
me, was the secret that obscures my name
revealed, then would this shade resolve to flesh
and flesh out my legacy, giving due
where due’s deserved. Instead, shadowy fame,
whispered theories, that is all I have. Fresh
ages hence perhaps truer light will shine:
to discover me and with me, what’s mine.
III
Then learn this of me: to have is to have; for it is a
figure in rhetoric that drink, being pour'd out of cup into a
glass, by filling the one doth empty the other; for all your
writers do consent that ipse is he; now, you are not ipse,
for I am he. “As You Like It” Act V Scene 1
Those who will dare to seek my work, will see,
hid, yet not hidden, within certain lines,
revelations half concealed. It was me
or better said, it was my mask. He pines
in vain who craves renown in exiled
straits as I have found myself, no longer
me but him, my words adored, yet reviled
my name. Has there ever been a wronger
sentence written than that writ one which I
endured? No name, no fame, no monument
but the cenotaphs my words designed. Died
twice, and in between my life underwent
another’s, as wine poured from glass to glass,
thusly contained, in lines of doubt I pass.
Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s work can be found in Think Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Able Muse, Non-Binary Review, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea (Great Weather for Media), Under Her Skin (Black Spot), and other venues. She’s been nominated for “The Best of the Net”, the Pushcart, the Elgin and the Rhysling. Her latest book is Curses, Black Spells & Hexes (Alien Buddha). An active member of the HWA, She is also the 2025 Elgin Award Chair for the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She lives on the West Coast of the USA; you can find her at https://x.com/PoetForest.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 