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18 August 2014 | Draft

Is this a Weapon I See Before Me, the Trigger Toward My Hand?

Barack Obama's soliloquy by Willy ShakesUS

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Contribution to further comprehension of the The Coalition of the Willy: musings on the global challenge of penile servitude (2004);
also see other experimental "poems" on this site

Soliloquy


Soliloquy of the Most Powerful Man on the Planet?

Slightly adapted from The Tragedy of Macbeth (2:1), with apologies to William Shakespeare
(adaptations are highlighted)


Is this a weapon which I see before me,
The trigger toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A weapon of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy shaft and payload of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing:

It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; evil celebrates
Pale Hellcat's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.
With Islam's ravishing strides, towards its design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
A bell rings
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, ISIS; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

See detailed commentary on Shakespeare's original version by Amanda Mabillard

Related references variously associating Macbeth and Obama:

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