Shakespeare And All And Sundry Poem by Gayathri Seetharam

Shakespeare and all and sundry
-Gayathri B. Seetharam
In his play, As You Like It, William Shakespeare has said,
As I have shared in another endeavour,
That pancakes taste delicious with mustard
And another quote of his which gels well with my personality and palate
Is that honesty coupled with beauty is honey a sauce to sugar
And literally speaking, I tried my banana split ice cream with honey on top of the banana
And chocolate syrup with nuts on top of the double scoop of cinnamon sugar and Swiss chocolate almonds ice cream;

It was a most pleasant result
And I wiped the ice cream bowl clean
Of course, we have honey mustard sauce
Which is a Shakespearism
Surely, I jest but the fact of the matter is
That through a source, I learnt
Last evening, after I had washed my hair and danced
In glorious abandon, secure in my solitary nudity and then masturbated
All in the sanctity of my parlour
That the future had telecast me during a G-7 summit
All logical reasoning failed and I had apparent news that
PM Justin Trudeau would publish me on the PM's website
And pay me for all his three presentations and fund me for a book based on my original ideas;

It caused a twinge or more like a pang
For I am an engineer with dual Master's degrees
And almost two years of paid work experience
And both newspaper and several internet publications to my credit
But it was also mixed with a feeling of relief
For PM Justin Trudeau is a hard taskmaster
And he has not backed his promise yet
Unless I count his apparent two CBC telecasts
And I am rather tired of outperforming myself;

But he is the only one of the four leaders
Who has encouraged me in my career oriented ambition
For Mr. Harper, Mr. Obama and Pres. Trump, despite the fact that I did devote
An endeavour to the former two and a beginning in 12 essays to Pres. Trump,
Have not given me a paycheque;

Since I was under the mistaken illusion that
I had crossed the deep river with this piece of good fortune,
I became crestfallen for it would mean
That the two lady leaders in the G-7 countries, the Chancellor of Germany
And the Swiss President would crow in delight
Thinking that they had gotten ahead through only the legitimate use of their brains;

I invite all of you leaders, male and female, to compare notes with my academic and work record
And see if some of Lady Luck has not aided and abetted you along with hard work and achievements,
Of course, I don't wish to be a leader of any sort
But I am ambitious in my own way
And I look at literature
And even the empty headed and flirtatious Scarlett O'Hara
Had an achiever's side to her for she successfully ran a business
There is Maggie Tulliver who is smarter than her older brother
But spends her life in penurious circumstances ostracized by society,
All because her loving father dies under unfortunate circumstances
And mercifully, she and her brother are united in death;

Then there is beautiful Portia who "rides Bassanio's balls"
And astonishes him when she, with her stunning legal argument,
And dressed as a male lawyer, wins the case against Shylock, the Jew,
When she reveals herself to her husband, he falls even more in love with her,
And we can examine literature's finest heroines
And they all have certain attributes
That set them apart from their less beautiful or equally beautiful counterparts;

I shall end with the bard's last dialogue in As You Like It
As I began my poem with his fine piece of writing
And say, "It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue,
But it is no more unhandsome to see the lord the prologue"
If a beginning has to have a man,
Then the play has to have a woman, a beautiful woman
Who falls in love and woos the men in her life with cooking and baking,
There I chickened out for I shall proclaim to the world
That surely, the Chancellor of Germany and the Swiss President,
Fair women though they be, do not lord it in the kitchen.