Two Minutes to Midnight
There is no button
Big or small
Just a single card
Inserted by a single hand
into a single slot
(Like taking cash from an ATM)
But hurling 900 missiles
delivering Armageddon,
Consuming like tinder
The loved and unloved,
The hated, the ignored,
Powerful and powerless,
Faithful and faithless,
Innocent and guilty;
An unbiased, indiscriminate,
democratic holocaust.
Who holds humanity in his pocket?
Carter sent it out with the laundry,
Clinton lost it for months,
It lay in Reagan’s blood
On a Washington street.
As he looked into the eye of history
Obama in Hiroshima,
Exposed it to the ashes
of 160,000 lives.
Trump caresses it in his little fingers,
Flashing Rocket Man
As if it were his American Express.
They call it the biscuit,
The famous card.
An evil host,
Transmogrified death.
Our planet hosts
15,000 warheads.
It takes just 100
To kill 2 billion people.
Where are these messengers
Of mass annihilation?
Ours lurk about the planet
And our backyards:
in Montana,
North Dakota,
Wyoming,
Nebraska,
Colorado.
They are
Beneath the seas,
On aircrafts in Missouri,
Belgium,
Germany,
Italy,
The Netherlands,
Turkey.
Our president holds the card,
Holds the biscuit, in his pocket.
He can whip it out
And detonate the earth.
He is but one.
In a world gone mad
The Doomsday Clock
Ticks closer
In 2010, six minutes
In 2012, five minutes,
In 2015, three minutes,
In 2017, two and a half
In 2018, two minutes to midnight.
Between the desire.
And the spasm.
Between the potency.
And the existence.
Between the essence.
And the descent.
Falls the Shadow.
This is how the world ends…
Not with a whimper but a bang.
