Ace Boggess: Rocketship X-M

Lippert Pictures, 1950

The more I watch, the less my eyes squeeze with anger
at what has become redundancy: man wipes out man-
(in this case Martian-) -kind with bombs.
Not a great leap, but a starting point:
one of these days, we’ll do it
because we’re bloody monkeys with a chaos finger
pointing at calamity. At least it hasn’t happened yet.
We haven’t gone nuke nuts, although wars blister,
always wars, big goddamned wars in the jungles,
deserts, cities waiting to return to dust.
I’d like to believe we’ve learned our lesson,
but ICBMs still hunker in silos
or pose like pricks on submarines—
not hippie happy yellow subs like the Beatles sang about,
each more of a throat-cutting Nautilus.
Could be we’re waiting for the right moment
to blow ourselves up, fat gods demanding sacrifice
until there’s nothing left to eat but us.

—

Copyright 2016 Ace Boggess. First published in Whimperbang. Republished with permission of the author.