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

It’s a poem about someone who feels dispossessed — of land, of marriage, of belonging — and who turns to myth, Shakespeare, samurai honour, and biblical echoes to make sense of that exile. The speaker moves through sheep‑stolen futures, lost wives, quills, taxes, tests, racism, and the strange intimacy of being “so close to something I love,” exposing how identity fractures under cultural pressure and personal longing. It becomes a portrait of a man wrestling with fate, intellect, and desire, trying to understand why the world keeps placing him just outside the circle he yearns to enter.