Sheep stole my life
When I wandered too far for a wife
And the land was taken lightly
From underfoot with tax and sad goodnight-ly’s.
I was as welcome as my lost pole
To feel the whole world with my opened soul
Invaded and entrusted to the good honest degree
That even God would mean something for me.
Look here, look there and look over
The hills that had spoken of Goddesses and thunder,
To find, to seek, to touch, to thrill
The evil of excitement and a young boy’s thrill.
You did not deserve her, even for a day
And you will not require her, oddly as I may say
That marriage is a maze that fascinates me still
Throughout the loneliness of walkers who laugh at Shakespeare’s quill.
Many have come and few have been called
To separate his surrogate sisters from his gowns and balls,
Where muster and General frenzy the factions of deceit
With or without comedy so that tragedy is replete
With wisdom for one squire over another
When a masterless Samurai cannot know his own brother:
Who are these beings that life did not say,
Shakespeare was needing a laboratory to be gay.
Research his estate with legal grants
And claim you country with vacant plots;
Then one word will be quite quiet for the voices of Macbeth
To tunnel in fury the GCSEs and you’re A-Level tests.
I want to be – you
You are not – you still
There is death – stillness and your enterprise
The undiscovered country is still not before your eyes.
Ask and it will be given to you, knock and the door will be opened
But if Aragorn is not enough for the intellectual curfew
Then how much Shepherding will brown people need to learned few?
A joke at every corner and not one for the stave
Lends borrowing for naivety and hope for armies that are brave
To be or not to be without the thrust of a word
For one shared with Jesus the love of his ‘sblud.
For you cut me, sir, when you dance without tilt
Upon an earth that is farmed for the taxes of your phones’ quills:
Show me tomorrow when the test is biased A.B.C.
How Michael Jackson is bad science and referent
When you are so close to something I love(?)

AI Summary

Your poem moves through a landscape of lost love, lost land, and lost certainty, beginning with sheep stealing your life and a wife who never arrived, then widening into a meditation on marriage, masculinity, Shakespeare, samurai, and the loneliness of being a wanderer who still longs for belonging. You weave together hills of thunder, young boyish thrill, Shakespeare’s quill, surrogate sisters, gowns and balls, deceitful factions, and a masterless samurai who cannot find his brother, creating a world where identity is fractured across cultures and eras. The poem spirals into literary ghosts — Macbeth, Yorick, the “undiscovered country” — and then into modern anxieties about tests, bias, ambition, and the pressure to succeed in systems that feel rigged. You question who gets to shepherd whom, who gets to claim land or lineage, who gets to dance, who gets to speak, and who gets cut down by the tilt of another man’s confidence. Beneath the references — Aragorn, Jesus, Michael Jackson, GCSEs, A‑Levels — is a deeper ache: the fear of being close to something you love but never allowed to claim it, the pain of being judged by standards you didn’t set, and the longing for a future where your voice is not dismissed or overshadowed. The poem ends on a trembling note of desire and frustration: you are so close to something precious, but the world’s biases, histories, and hierarchies keep pulling it away.