I am posting this early, so the commenters don't kill me.

Oh Oedipus, Oedipus, Oedipus Rex
Fated to kill his father, and with his mother have sex
And now his sister is also his daughter
What that is like, I cannot even guess.

The young man became king after solving a riddle
Given by the Sphinx: he knew adulthood came in the middle
He succeeded Laius, who was in fact his father,
And he led the Thebeians both with strength and with valor

Until a plague struck the city of Thebes,
And our hero, with hubris, said he’d end the disease
He sent his brother-in-law Creon, who was also his uncle
To travel to Delphi, and discover the source of the junk-le

So Uncle Creon talked to the god Apollo,
Whose advice Oedipus knew he surely should follow
Until he found out Apollo called him a killer
Which is when Sophocles turns it into a thriller.

Oedipus, disbelieving, demanded the truth
So he could clear his own name and stop saying “forsooth!”
He sent Uncle Creon, apparently a slave
To send for Tereisias, whose vision was grave

Indeed the prophet was blind, whereas Oedipus saw
But on his side most surely wasn’t the law
At first the blind man refused to say what he knew,
But Oedipus insisted to hear what was true

Though the prophet insisted the truth would hurt,
He had to follow the orders of his king, who was becoming quite curt.
So he told him the truth: what the oracle said,
Yet Oedipus was left there just scratching his head

At what it could mean, at all of these lies
So he called in Jocasta, his mother and wife
And he asked her to tell him all that she knew
About the day his father had been beaten in two

She knew that it happened where three roads converged
And it was here that her story and Oedipus’s did merge
For he too had been there, one night years ago,
And there he had taken others’ lives, to protect his own.

Once he conquered the Sphinx and became Thebes’s king,
He did what was right and gave Jocasta a ring,
Yet it was not right, for she was his mother
And with her he did give birth to his own sisters and brothers.

What lessons can be learned from Oedipus’s tragic tale?
When one tries to avoid fate, one often fails
Yet the choices one makes will affect his whole life
Just make better choices than choosing your mom to be your wife.