Tag Archives: nuclear

PRECIOUS

PRECIOUS

I was confiding
in my friends
the insects

all the true scientific
horrors of nuclear war

when you came down
like a missile
from up
   on high

demand that I shut
my mouth, cut
all such nonsense

speaking through a translation
device
     this being a head, a father’s
head attached
to a stick

and then, since our debate,
was going nowhere
you opened up
on my tiny
friends
with a state-of-the-art
multi-
   barrelled weapon

firing
     millions, billions
of rounds ripping up the landscape

but fortunately
my friends being so small
took
   out such precious
few of them.

STORM

STORM

the windows rattle
it is a slight storm

the windows
melt

it is
a nuclear showdown

thousands of years
millions perhaps
into the future

our descendants (much
altered) or
another species
must decide
(after finding the
bits and pieces
putting them
together)

what hatred brought
these two antagonists
to, as matter of
security and
deep principle,
uncontrollable hatred,
impossible fear

to equalise everything
in mutual suicide

windows melting
across the whole globe

FLAME

FLAME

so committed
to the horror
they ignore,
overlook, suppress
the flame

Oh, brief terrible candle,
do you not know
that it is possible
for the atoms
in your body
to reach critical mass?

that you could blow
like a regular backya
plutonium warhead
take out a street, a city,
a neighborhood

and even then
they would not listen
would find
the spin to
cover their sins
hide their complicity
deflect all blame

but you burn small
tiny, a brief candle,
your death your own
no spreading
no lingering

sign of how deep
it runs, all
the refused shame

BACKYARD

BACKYARD

I did not sweat
through the missile crisis
I was too young, had
no idea where Cuba was
and it was too cold

testing an old siren
outside our school
fun
   sitting under my desk
practice
making perfect

that cold cold bipolar
war
    one wromg move
could get every bomb
from Kalinin to Siberia
heading for
my face
  every American base
.
but that’s geopolitics
and the worst of ideology

Oh
    beast, non-
                beast

bestial, non-bestial:

    wish there were a switch
to flick or dial to turn
to shift us, bounce
us between polarities

would be good for my
Mars in Aries issues, get
my return
      blow in first forgo
and concentrate
on kindness
     and diplomacy

and not stacking my missiles
or my anti missile missiles
right in
       your back yard

OBSERVE

OBSERVE

watch this poem
change on you

transform
before your very eyes

splitting
     of pathways, sliding
doors

two
    complete readings
whole new universes
brought into
being

in one
it goes Schrodinger
and the poor little cat
goes completely
zombie
    uncertain whether
when box
is open
it
   lives or
dies; is dead
          or alive

in another
it goes Oppenheimer
heads out
       to New Mexico
wipes

out
half
       of Japan

saw the film; he’s the man

and here you are
in state of
                 superposition

I have
never been super anything

neither
          in faith, nor reason

watch this poem watch
us both observe

DEVIL IN THE DORITOS


DEVIL IN THE DORITOS

the chips
I am eating are
flaming hot
off the scale as
regards their
Scoville rrating

each chip not a chip
as much as shot
of concentrated flame,
chemical fire
   calculated to build
up to a spike
and then
   the endophins come
floating
first in a dribble and
then
    in a stream, a tide of
feel good
a one with the Universe
though a
   furnace is raging

you in the Himalayas, up
on Everest
     about to summit K2

on every psychadelic music
record cover
            a picture of nirvana
(state, not
Seattle grunge band)

and redeemed by the fire,
purged by the near
nuclear
    (thing built
by Oppenheimer there in
New Mexico) a

picture of you