what

should I fly
unto
my senses

delight
with
crowns and rich apparel

dance and then depart

show
what magic can perform

and do
a thousand
deeds?

I
shall

An erasure poem — today’s suggestion from napowrimo.net — excerpted from Christopher Marlowe’s The tragical history of Doctor Faustus (1604). That was fun. (And — it is not cheating, I insist, to use the stage directions!)

image: Maskentanz (1929) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938). I am informed and believe that this work is in the public domain in the United States, since copyright protection in Germany at the time endured for fifty years after the author’s death. Kirchner killed himself in 1938, a year after the Nazis declared his art “degenerate” and destroyed much of it.