Pre-Emptive Initial Strike

This poem reflects my own anti-conflict and particularly anti-nuclear weapons, and was written with dismay after Theresa May, then Britain's prime minister, replied without hesisitation that she would be willing to launch nuclear weapons, vaporising hundreds of thousands of civilians. This kind of nationalist and conservative thinking seen in the blasé threats of the likes of May, Trump, Kim Jong Il and others can be said with confidence as they will suffer little blowback from their self-made catastrophe; it is the ordinary person, you and I, whose future is condemned to uncertain anxious doom by these words that ruddy-faced men, desperate to relive a world war, lap up.

Pre-Emptive Initial Strike

She has been crawling up since Spring.

They dropped little boy

They dropped singing songs

Chocolate bars and bully beef

(not for her, not for her)

Tree seeds stratifying in the fridge

One day I’ll make the desert green again

I’ll make the desert eat again

I’ll make you dessert; get you a fat man.

Glad for the winter, for the ash

For the still birth in the pan, for the rash;

All is well, clouds never part, but. Clouds never part, but.

"Are you prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that could kill hundreds of thousands of men, women and children?”

Lips unfurl

Brittle iron

Gotcha gotcha gotcha

“Yes.”