the nuclear football

The nuclear football the U.S president's emergency satchel, is a briefcase, the contents of which are to be used to authorize a nuclear attack.

the man who carries

the nuclear football

never eats at home

preferring instead those

beef jerky packs

and bags of mixed nuts that

he picks up at the cashier counter

of the local hardware store

 

no one has bothered to clean

the nuclear football

and there is a

thin film of dried

mucus of the handle

 

last month the man came down with

a bad case of diarrhea and

managed to spatter the thing

while it sat next to him in

the bathroom stall

 

some say that it is

the x-rays released

by the chain reaction and

transformed into heat

and blast wave that

tear apart the flesh and bone

of most victims

while others maintain

that it is the relentless

decay of cellular motion

the piercing of life

by rays

 

yes it’s been quite difficult

to incentivize the

nuclear football though

many have tried

Reviews

[Eilis]

I think we have a false sense of endings that can lull us into a kind of complacency. The Cold War as a historical concept becomes something new contemporaneously. World affairs are overwhelming and even less controllable than our own yet we are given a sort of emotional responsibility towards them from the time we are young. I remember being a child in the 80’s and going outside and watching the sky for nuclear missiles. There was a sense that if I was watching they would never come.

The man in your poem seems somewhat transient. Eschewing roots. Only eating on the go. Life itself seems like one long string of uncertain thoughts. Perhaps there’s the notion that every moment could be your last but rather than instill an urgency to enjoy life it’s an urgency toward running or worrying. And then it all, in the end, might hinge on something not really able to be foreseen.

I remember reading about the suffering of those in Japan who survived the bombs. The way the soil was contaminated and how there were varying ways of dying that outlived the shock of that well-publicized destruction. Slow suffering. Our capacity to destruction and indifference never stops surprising me. It’s hard not to feel consumed by these things we know but cannot control and would likely not choose if we had the power to influence choices.

I like the way the poem moves through these different moods. From a short of dry humor to a bare horror. The contemplation of which is pure nightmare but not by any means out of the scope of reality.

[SkinlessFrank]

Yes. We strange little creatures with oversized brains have the habit of forever underappreciating the power unleashed whenever one of us manages to crack open a corner of Nature’s blinding fire, be it gunpower, the atom, and now AI. But there’s always a cadre toiling away to convert that fire-death into something on the surface that is seemingly mundane. I always do the dark laugh when I am reminded that within that briefcase there is something called “the biscuit” that the President must crack open to obtain he secret codes to end humanity. How cute. I love your reviews.

[Eilis]

There’s definitely a touch of the absurd in the naming of our destructive implements.

[Casey Truax]

I've heard that if you write the truth it will be called satire. You blend the literally world-ending with the mundane and it shows just how comical and disturbing it is to place so much power in the hands of mere human beings.

[. serah .]

-- i just read your author's quote, Maestro D. ... and now i'm reading this poem in an entirely different light... -- it must be a nightmare for the man to carry the briefcase which has the power to authorise an attack which could possibly not just destroy the target but eventually the whole world... and erase mankind from the face of the earth...

[SkinlessFrank]

thanks serah....for some reason, the nightmares i used to have about nuclear warfare when i was a child have now returned.,,

[. serah .]

-- sorry to hear that, Maestro D., but glad you wrote about them ... my nightmares have become somewhat timid since i started going out for a walk but they still haunt me... i hope to find a way to get rid of them... and when i do... i'll definitely share my notes with you... i know what it's like...

[Ed Hart]

skinless poetry, guts revealed, ooze, muck, slurg and snertz...ovenbaked humor...doesn't serah give great comments...i'll just go around saying, 'dito'...

[SkinlessFrank]

ed, i love that word "snertz".....you are too kind....and yes, serah (what a mind!)

[Ed Hart]

'snertz', as i use to tell my young boys, and whatever other children i was carpooling, is the juice you get from squeezing small birds or mice in your hand, if you happen to get thirsty on the road, or anytime for that matter...

[. serah .]

-- wow... for me, this is an extended metaphor... it reads like my biography... "the nuclear football" was an impossible idea... (one that could only have been imagined under the influence of a highly damaging substance)... it was a delusion like no other... -- it made me hallucinate without me realizing that i was hallucinating... -- then it infected me with verbal diarrhoea... -- i think if anyone sane had interacted with me at the time, they'd have said, "you're full of garbage"... -- i am now left with elements of physical degeneration that i'm compelled to deal with in order to be sane again... -- i didn't think or realize at the time that "the nuclear football" in my life had been sold to me by a conglomerate... and that this conglomerate likes to manipulate thousands into buying things which are obviously harmful... -- nothing was obvious to me... -- the fourth stanza is particularly insightful... i wonder if i was just a victim of "the piercing of life"... -- i would like to believe that there was more to it... but i don't know... -- what i do know, after reading this foray into brilliance which you've so studiously etched, is that when we adopt a thought, an idea or a philosophy, we should really think about whether or not someone is aggressively selling it to us... and of course... we should step out of the stupor of delusional emotions to actually evaluate it on merit... -- that would be a fitting tribute to your words on this page...