What Is Peace
The front door closed behind me.
Along the city's mourning streets,
eyes glanced up,
and quickly looked away.
'Ought implies can'.
In the Ethics seminar,
I could not help feeling like a fly on the wall.
Words drowned in heavy water,
the Socratic method,
a philosophical whirlpool of linguistic deceit.
Something touched my spine,
imagination,
maybe the words
'Ought not to implies did not have to'
and I shuddered.
Two mushroom clouds ruptured the sky
and I saw people looking
at the word game being played in the comfortable room.
Pick out someone or something to help ease the pain.
The brittle crutches collapsing all around me,
the treaties and deterrent theories of the mind,
the future,
balancing,
on the threat of M.A.D.
while embittered rulers litter history.
And lying in the debris of the gutters,
the headlines in big black letters proclaimed:
'SUMMIT CONFERENCE'
I could sense these vultures feeding on the corpse of innocence,
sharp-toothed experts,
tearing and gnawing away at language,
while in their wombs and bunkers,
and their locked minds,
they continue manufacturing humanity's guilt.
I know,
I know,
but my mind won't let me rest and does not spare me.
If not them, then...
What some have left mankind.
Children,
I hear you crying in the streets and stores.
But later he'll tell you bedtime stories,
and sing lullabies, nine meals from anarchy.
Let him rest now.
He's been busy at work all day devising,
(for his political employers)
society's lies about security,
and materials to wipe out
expeditiously,
millions of families very much like his own.
I feel each moment of my day and night,
a loaded gun pointed directly at me
with the message:
'This is the price you have to pay for our peace.'
In my all-seeing hatred for those who have done this thing,
in my contempt for their nightmare vision,
who or what is there to cling or turn to?
Every face appears a tortured mirror,
every ism and philosophy an irrelevance.
I say, I say, I say:
Hitler was called Scrotum
because he was a nutcase.
She was only a nuclear physicist's daughter;
But she sure could give you one hell of a bang.
I have nowhere, nothing, nobody, to turn to.
I am lost,
I am lost,
imprisoned in a city of loneliness,
sensing each day could be my last.
Pictures on the screen and in the papers,
fail to disturb, they come from so far away,
another planet, a fantasy.
I close my mind in the hope that I survive.
Tomorrow is another day,
and I shut my door on this sad world.
Copyright © Clifford Chapman | Year Posted 2017
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