"GIVE ME THAT MAN..."

Give me that man

That is not passion’s slave

Give me that blanket that comforts and soothes

For in my heart

There was a fighting that would not let me sleep,

Our indiscretion

Sometime serve us well.

In those wakeful moments’

When around a surgeon’s scalpel the blood congeals

And time is spent to heal.

What a piece of work is a man

The quintessence of dust.

What is he

Whose grief bears such emphasis

Such intricate complexity

Of thought and action?

How noble in reason

How infinite in faculties

To quell the cry of pain.

How like an angel

How express and admirable

To drown the misery

And purge the disquiet

Of a thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to

And to take arms against a sea of trouble

And by opposing, end them.

Yet within the firmament of that reason

I could be bounded in a nutshell

And count myself a king of infinite space,

Were it not that I have bad dreams.

These dreams, though this be madness

There is method in’t.

The vile mechanism feeds

And eyes without feeling

Feeling without sight,

Cannot chart the course to reason.

The spirit that I have seen, may be a devil

And the devil hath power t’assume a pleasing shape

Cleave the general ear with horrid speech,

Make mad the guilty and appal the free.

These clever studied orphans of untruth

Confound the ignorant and amaze

Indeed the very faculties of eyes and ears.

They forget in their charted hypocrisy;

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

The power that exudes such tyranny

Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes between

The pass and fell incensed points of mighty opposites.

They know not what they do

As their power is often fleeting

And the unholy madness, a passing fancy

A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king,

And eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm

They thus find permanence in indignity

within houses that last till doomsday.

While chastising nobility, they cry and

Humanity bleeds as one is lost to the many

Eviscerating the noble cause of individuality

The chief good and market of this time

Is left wanting in art and science,

Or somewhere in between.

This warlike paragon of animals

Abuses me to damn me.

As villainy though it have no tongue,

Will speak with most miraculous organ!

One day!

Leaving in its vile dust

This beauty of the world,

This noble of humans

This physician.

In apprehension how like a god,

I will wear him in my heart’s core,

Ay, in my heart of heart

As he grunts and sweats under the weary life

Bringing comfort through his discomfort

To the one of the many!

This poem is a composite of Shakespeare's eloquent words and some of mine. Juxtaposing with the Bard is tantamount to courting disaster, yet I will "screw my courage to the sticking place!"