On Shakespeare’s Birthday

Six feet or not six feet, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The boredom of sheltering in place,
Or to take arms against a sea of stay-at-home orders
And by opposing end them.

To eat—to sleep,
And no more; a routine we crave to end
The lethargy and the frozen dinners
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be rid of.

To eat, to sleep;
To nap, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that afternoon nap, what sleepwalking may come,
That we might shuffle out to check the mail,
Must give us pause—where’s our mask,
Is this the calamity of the rest of our life?

For who would bear the uncertainty of what time and day it is,
The empty store shelves, the Internet disruptions,
The home schooling, the stimulus payment delay,
The incompetence of officeholders, and the price gouging
That businesses of the innocent take,
When he himself might his own hand sanitizer make
With leftover alcohol?

Who would fever bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weighted blanket,
But that the dread of nothing to do after lunch,
The undiscovered cable tv show, from whose grip
No viewer returns, breaks down the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus coronavirus does make cowards of us all.
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And baseball’s first pitch of the season,
With or without a crowd, is turned away
And lost in the name of inaction.