Shakespearean Fools Love Without Abandon

Growing up on the street of hard knocks,

Fighting to defend rights,

Gives the right to defend,

Injustice.

It’s a man’s world,

A boys club,

Where the lads knock around,

For mateship is a rite of passage,

And those not in the club,

Are out in the cold.

What if one is down and out?

Homeless?

Do we walk around them or offer a hand up?

Do we sit on the pavement and talk to them?

Or judge them as having failed society?

What if society has failed them?

Do we cast them into the Tower of London?

Or let them sleep Underground?

Swept under the carpet,

Or do we open the door to compassion?

For that could be you or me left at the station.

Many see weakness in sorrow,

Many find power in security,

But what if the greatest security

was to discover your sorrow?

To unmask your joy?

For anger lies buried alive,

Burning beneath layers of disappointment,

When life is a school of hard knocks,

For you are either with them or against them,

There is no grey that matters,

There is no middle ground,

When you no longer hear the cries,

For help!

Life is a chessboard of pawns and Kings,

What of horses for courses?

Who don’t choose to walk the straight line?

For life is not a strategy or mind map,

It sleeps in the wisdom of the dream,

Seeking to awaken,

To truth.

Shakespeare’s home,

Stratford upon Avon,

Lived in the times of Tutor,

Where Kings and Queens recoiled against their humble origins,

The Lord of the manor sewed lines and loins,

Cultivating manners, prestige and golden coins,

For privilege toiled in the fields of the masses,

But what of cultivating Shakespearean fools?

For Only Fools and Horses challenge the times,

Speak and run outside the lines,

Inventing a new man-u-script a new narrative,

A role play of spontaneity, gaiety, novelty,

Breaking the rules of pomp and formality,

To play on the edges of life as reality,

For wisdom is at the end of the eye lash,

Its image is mirrored in the shaking of a tear,

Perhaps this was the seer of King Lear?

Tragedy and comedy were the masks of great suffering and kin-g-ship.

I am both a fool and a mate,

For I open the gate and let the horses run wild,

For suppression breeds violence,

Charm seeds deception,

Control breeds calls for freedom,

And I am free to speak my truth,

And ask for the middle ground,

For we are no longer in the middle ages,

The truth always set us free,

To see …

We can love without abandon!