Logos Interruptus

When Shakespeare wrote his plays
they were his day job, his sonnets
were where his true self lay.
The older I get the more I understand
how for the modern ear the appeal
of his plays is how they record the coinage
of so many words that were new in his time.
Through the plays these words have stayed
in the language-one tenth of all the words he used.
Aside from his poetic vocation, what Shakespeare
really wanted to do was invent the short story-
think of the lacunae in his plots-
which he combined with writing a thesaurus,
but this troupe of actors kept interrupting him
before he could finish each story, and restitched
the word lists with the stories to dramatise them,
which is how they turned into his thirty seven plays.