Ophelia’s Lost Soliloquy*

I’m green and part of what swims

I’m no longer your collateral damage

I wake up in a river singing the real songs
     My arms are ready

And all you can say is I perplex and terrify

the undone woman doing things up my own way
     with the spell of leaf, pollen, petal

I’m now greater and wilder than
     your power games and rough punctuation

I reject your steep and thorny way
          I’m not-to-be this, I will be an other

My sex isn’t yours to legislate

I no longer accept your tender as true pay

not in bitcoin, not in sterling, not in any yen
          I shall disobey

Forget the glass of fashion and the mould of form

I’m not your baby love, nor your candy girl
          This is no strip tease

I’m mad, not bad, yes, a great big chunk of mad
          so, here’s what I say to your larded lies about flowers

haha sing-song, haha blahblah
          Good night, ladies. Good night, good night

I’m so far now from your total control

Take away your fine family con-job
          leave me alone, even as you left me alone

And you, great pretender, murderer

supposed boy, and your deepfake whining

I was the more deceived. 
          Turn off the camera, let me be

I have my distress, I allow it and I take it
          fling it into the great water

I walk away from some farcical feminine baseline
          and I scream and sing

Death isn’t beautiful, forget that sop
          Madness isn’t an ornament

madness is up here, in my head, my heart

and underneath, underwater, underground

‘My fantastic garlands’? If you only knew

There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me

I conspire with weeds, with rivers, and the winding
          Can I change my performance

Probably not, or maybe in season three

But I’m still in your feed, your vids, cctv

I’m a forever woman, circumnavigating now

I’m gliding downstream to the islands, the seas

part of the circle that threads touch

          Transformation is the greatest gift

I will survive and you’ll know me still

Yes, you who pushed me
          And, yes, who are you to say

Jill Jones’ latest book is Acrobat Music: New & Selected Poems (2023), short-listed for the 2024 John Bray Poetry Prize, long-listed for the 2024 ALS Gold Medal and commended in the 2023 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. In 2021 her book, Wild Curious Air, won the 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, and in 2015 she won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry for The Beautiful Anxiety.

* Contains a few quotes from Ophelia’s speeches in Hamlet plus one or two other well-known phrases from that play.

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Ophelia’s Lost Soliloquy*

COASTLINES JOURNAL