As If
by Jim Peterson

When I was Shakespeare,
the weight of a new manuscript under my arm
bound and tied with leather
was enough to sustain the fight in me.
And my hands, which wanted nothing more
than to turn the pockets of strangers inside out,
curled up like fists even while I slept.

When I was Shakespeare, the moon
etched my face on the windowpane,
the sun carved my shadow in the dust
and the dogs abandoned by the dead
could not obliterate it.
The critics who sat in the galleries,
who never felt the rain on their heads
in the midst of a soliloquy,
who never tasted the cold roots of originality
bitter and foreboding in their mouths,
scribbled their tiny paragraphs, their palsied puns,
then avoided my eyes later in the pub
as if I ever gave a good god damn.