Elizabethan

When I upon my mirror’d self look back
as if it were Anachronism vast,
atrociously mis-timed, the Should-Have-Been
appears to be, and the great Wasn’t is.
I’m then a man of Shakespeare’s time:
a malcontent; decisive, cunning, dark -
of such inventions and revenges; swoons,
shifts, slights; of such perditions capable!
Again the present represents itself,
and I am unimaginably me,
a twenty-five-year old from Bedfordshire
who writes the morning, works the afternoon,
diminished by all past diminishment
of man by man, by men, and by myself.