whats the point? why this insistence to write? when everything has been written about. and written so well. but like a devout masochist, i allow myself sweetly to be drawn again to this bookstore, what should be a proscribed shrine for me. i stalk around, fully conscious of my rank, my caste, my uselessness, and piously touch the book spines, venerating the relics of long dead but still miraculous saints. i am an unworthy pilgrim atoning for what i hope my venial sin of obsessing to be in the company of book writers. walking around, i pray i don't break my friendship with my god for this my insolent insistence. and then finally, i go, for i can't help it, marvel, since prostrating is frowned upon in this public space, at this entire wall of shakespeares. and the man's soaring spiritual ambition just threw me to hopelessness. quaking under the immensity of the man's rhetorical and imaginative heft, i recite the man's canon, my rosary's mysteries. a mother fixated son is haunted by his father's uncommunicative ghost. a love crazed boy meets an equally love gaga girl amid the bloody fighting of their feuding families. a portly drunk and a bohemian prince exact some exorbitant taxes from the rebels. a warmongering english king goes waist deep into his conquest of france. a paranoid moor strangles dead his pristine wife. a foolish old man drives himself crazier after demanding who among his three daughters love him most. two seemingly mismatched couples get waylaid in a thick forest on a sweet summer night. a sex kitten of a queen ultimately dies of an asp bite. the entire world is here. and this man conjured it. and i suspect, i am just one of his inventions: a despairing fool, parched for words but drowning in his dreams.