XXXTentacion x John Taylor

Sunspot Lit just picked up another of the hip hop poems (to be published later this month), which in this instance goes out to both XXXTentacion, social media bad boy, and John Taylor, who fewer people these days know about. Taylor was a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, a waterman, and a poet. Watermen, who helped ferry people and goods on the Thames and other rivers, had a reputation for being just shy of highwaymen, certainly criminal and immoral, or, to draw the comparison a little closer, bad boys. Taylor also wrote poetry, collected subscriptions from people who wanted to read it, and assembled chapbooks once he had funding and distributed them to said subscribers. The poem intersperses characterizations that could apply to either artist with trickled-out palindromes that result in a sort of chant.