Shakespeare and the Blues

Essay #1 Mrs. Goldberg’s AP Intro to Lit Shakespeare understood the blues. He knew parting was such sweet sorrow. Mr. Shakespeare was the main MC Of the Elizabethan scene and so I figure To be or not to be (similar to how you be?) Be as timeless as hell and as universal Since such questions never go out of style. I only wish Othello had sussed out Iago And taken Iago down to the crossroads And asked Iago the devil’s true-true name. Juliet is like Lady Gaga (in my HBO rewrite) And Romeo lives in Harlem with his moms — Though that’s only his nom-de-plume. He wants to be the first rapper with a PhD. And Robert Burns smiles to keep from crying And when he penned the best-made plans Of mice and men (not rats) often go astray What he really meant was shit happens. Dead Old White Men they knew the blues Though they didn’t always know what They knew okay maybe not even in 1619 By which time Shakespeare was Auld Lang Syne and Burns was not yet in this world But the blues isn’t stuck on color or CP time.