Shakespeare
Shakespeare inadvertently struck his head
on his bookshelf
One day
Consumed in his profound thoughts,
And huge anger
at his neighbour’s wife
Who had plucked flowers from his garden
That he had saved for
Ophelia,
His secret girlfriend,
His wife hardly had the wind of,
And conjured Hamlet
In his Elsinore castle
Taking cudgels
In schizophrenia
Against the King,
and his mom, Gertrude,
in the image of Ann Hathaway.
In the meantime,
the ghost of his dad was getting restless
To launch the drama in the dead of a Denmark night
That would take the theatre by storm
And keep the world enthralled
Packed in its four thousand lines of impossible delight and surprises
At all turns,
Sudden, hairpin, sharp, et al
Which even Shakespeare didn’t know,
He being a realised soul
Plowing the field of literature
With his reed dipped in verse,
In a trance
With consummate certainty,
Not much before becoming
A Bard
Of the universe,
While many more plots
On tattering folios
He spun
With alarming alacrity
For all,
Friends or foes!
Who says you are dead, Bard?
