Sonnet: Hamlet Act V: The End Scene

Edwin Booth as Hamlet
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by John Kendall Hawkins

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Starts out as a dinner party ka-bash;

(Whoa, a fly belly up. What did it eat?

Flies have tongues on the bottom of their feet.)

You pray your grabby fingers don't get rash.

Shitfaced Hamlet's all pistols at dawn

angry, his mother already passed out

at the table, Edwin Booth's got the gout

or sumpin and sits there as with a yawn.

Why, then revelers start dropping like flies.

Ophelia, who'd just come back from the dead,

looks at her chalice, screams, "Icky poison!"

and down she goes, and there's lots of noisin'

in the vile valley of the overfed.

To be or not -- who gives a good goddamn --

nobody wants to listen to a ham.