My Skeleton and Tidbits from "The Kitchen Cabinet"

Every time I look at this picture, I see my own skeleton sitting on the rock, downcast and disappointed. I have no reason to see this, I have no desire to see this, and I have no will to see this. Yet I see this all the same.
Perhaps it is because I always write about tragic things. The Fallen Caryatid is a traditional Shakespearean tragedy, after all; Mark has his tragic flaw. I think his Richard II monologue says it all:

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Presidents... How some have been impeached, some slain in the throes of war, some haunted by the ghosts they have impeached, some poisoned by their people, some politics killed, all murdered. For within the hollow oath denies the mortality of a President, keeps Death his Cabinet. And for ever-so short a time, he is let to breathe, to play tyrant, to pen a page in the history of the free world, to be feared, to kill with a mere inflection of his voice; in ever-so short a time, he is let to become an egotistical ass who acts with the air of Zeus, as if this flesh were not so mortal but a bastion impregnable; and so fooled, darkness fells the castle wall, and adieu, dear President! Cover your heads and lay down your hands and forget the lewd station that to me you have given. Forget respect, tradition, protocol, and duty, for Demos has fooled us all. I eat the same fruits of liberty as you, have appetites the same, taste grief the same, and need friends the same. Subjected thus, how can you say to me that I am a President?

I still cannot decide if I like that passage. It seems almost...brutally inappropriate to twist Shakespeare's words so. Yet, on the contrary, there is something oddly satsifying about it. Perhaps it is merely because I am able to end the chapter with this:

There was a thin line of ants marching just outside the glass. There little black beady bodies fell together like a strand of black pearls. On their tired backs they held crumbs twice their size—probably breadcrumbs from Mark’s dinner last night. He watched them march military-like through a small hole in the White House’s exterior. They were taking these crumbs to their queen, he knew, a queen who neither worked nor proved her worth, a queen who sat tyrannical atop a little throne and whiled away the days while the workers toiled on. The thought of it made him nauseous. He longed to take a sheet of paper and put it in front of the hole, caging the queen and freeing the workers, but they were outside while he was trapped within. He could not help them, could not save them.
He turned away from the door’s glass, pushed his back again it, contemplated the nuances of his shadow, tried to forget the ants, and fought to forget the world.
He sat thinking a long time in the dying light.

C'est finis pour ce soir.