Tag Archives: nuclear

THIRTEEN

THIRTEEN

woke up
in the middle
of the night
to watch Alan
Dershowitz
debate Glenn
Greenwald

over the absolute
necessity of surgical strike
bombing
the shit out
of Iran

which Dershowitz won
hands-down handsomely by
ultra cogent argument
and
persistent
interruption

and being
a Harvard Man

this being the University
that refused thirteen
students
their degrees

woke up
to watch
Alan
Dershowitz

in an alternate
universe where
they had removed
all the universities

Dershowitz
talking the same old
safe-talk
     shibboleth

the clock
somehow gone wrong
gone
hopelessly
intertextual

telling me it is
no time
for peace
for lying secure
in bed
thinking
poetry

already
on the verge
of striking thirteen

LIVESTREAM

LIVESTREAM

I was
a walking stream
of consciousness

a stream of consciousness
walking with a cobra-headed
hard red-wood stick

treating myself to
a slow circumnavigation
of the heart of the farm

on YouTube meanwhile
much screaming & pontificating
about red lines being crossed
and slippery slope
to no tomorrow

tactical nukes even
as we speak ready for
testing
   being wheeled into position

men in their Strangelove
think tanks think
it’s just
  a game of brinkmanship
serious
high-stakes bluffing

and me in my Cassandra moment
thinking about the pressing
of that button
to remove the surprise
from smugness in person

it’s wonderful, what
it can do, what platform
it affords for
all career launching

a prestigious degree wreathed
in ivy league ivy

how in such hands, how
safer than safe their
algorithm would
wish us to feel.

SUSQUEHANNA 2

SUSQUEHANNA 2

there are ghosts
in your country
I saw them dancing
in the mist all
along the Susquehanna
one cold January morning
just after 9/11
a couple of miles upstream
from Three Mile Island

and we were talking Civil War mlilitary,
myself and this kindly
African American
Professor of Sociology from
Harrisburg Penn State

him detailing how the Federals and Confederates
were criss-
crossing this territory
playing this cat and
mouse game
only to crash headlong into
each other at a
place called Gettysburg

of course neither of us
back in 2002 could have imagined
twenty so years on this
land would
find itself of the brink of
such a division
where the spectre of such
horror looming again

and those precious
twenty or so days
my sole experience
of America

of breathing the air of
its liberty, if
such is your belief

something the ghosts
trying to tell me, their
cold touch
    alerting  me

a new world and
forever graveyard

tension
in the spirit world
it seems far-fetched to bridge

the river
      with its
       Native American name

flowing with the forever
waters of such secrets

leaving
    the old lies, the old lies
to spread, make
good trade,
do good business

what ripples outward here I fear
ultimately chain
       in its reaction

EXCEPTIONAL

EXCEPTIONAL

death will not
be satisfied with
simply thousands

death wants
millions, billions,
that’s the price
that was set
and will be paid

if this
were not so
why do you think
death had to invent
comets, supervolcanoes,
meteors, rogue asteroids?

to supplement the vast varieties
of weapons of mass destruction
its most beloved
of all
   species
happened to event

including, not exclusively,
the vast thermonuclear arsenals
huge stockpiles of
megaton, kiloton
missiles and bombs

sheer numbers here
dictated by the laws
of necessity
    of supply and
demand

and exceptional theory,  but
sadly it ends here
with the demise of
its authors

of whose disappearance
the rest of the Universe
could
    not give a damn