The Party of the First Part

There’s the party of the first part

And there’s the party of the second

No matter what sort of loco weed

Shakespeare happened to be smoking

While composing his verse

I’ve decided once again

To partake of more of the same

Ecstatic freedom of speech

However easy or hard

It may be to come by

There’s the party of the first

And there’s the party

Of the last resort too

It makes no difference

What else you

Happen to be doing

When Yama comes calling

In the end it’s your choice

Not that it matters much
To indulge or abstain
At best it's a semi-vegetative
State we all end up in
Any way you
Look at it

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

By way of explaining at least the first verse of this poem, I read a news story online this morning (you can read the full story here) about how an academic researcher in Australia (government funded no doubt) has just published a paper which strongly suggests the Bard of Avon may have been smoking some fine Virginia bud when he penned his very best plays.  The bud, so the researchers claim, had been brought back to Merry Old England by Sir Walter Raleigh.  To toke or not to toke, that is the question.  The evidence supporting the claim that Shakespeare was a pot smoker consists of molecular analysis of clay pipe stems that were recently excavated from the great Bard's back yard, which show trace evidence of cannibus sativa residue.  The paper also cites Shakespeare's Sonnet 76 for additional textual support of their claim:

Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name

Sonnet 76 (in pertinent part)