Can you imagine looking

into your child’s eyes knowing

your country and others are staring

down a launch-on-warning status

with thousands of nuclear warheads?

are you feeling

a little gulp of poignancy as you read this?

if not, what’s wrong with you?

did we make it too abstract?

those lunatic decades playing

nuclear stare-down chicken

should have wounded our hearts

with at least as much treachery as Vietnam

but my generation

who fought in and against that spasm

of collective dysfunction hardly noticed

once the dorms went coed,

weed got cheap, and the draft stopped

we didn’t bother to march and breathe tear gas

even when our leaders

continued playing poker

with our lives

what’s wrong with us?

now our children and grandchildren

face foreign slaughter

in the name of patriotism, JAYZUS! glory,

and goddamned oil while burning

coal cooks the planet

what’s wrong with us?