Part of a triad of air, land and sea
From the fallout, there is no sanctuary
A conference call between all five sites
Can lead to a litany of winter nights
Unnaturally eerie, functionally weird
These are the outcomes that everyone feared
The end of days foretold by prophets before
These foreshadows are no longer the stuff of lore
Fallout landing, totally salting the Earth
The mother unfruitful, unable to give birth
Her children can't grasp the concept of sphere
Their land claims are only protected by fear
Whether in concert or by an agent gone sour
We are now inside the final quarter hour
Even though the first shrub started drawing down
We are on part to go six feet below the ground
Not the sixty feet where the officers are
Everyone else is now part of the perennial scar
Despite being paved over, hope is fleeting
On our own shit we shall be eating
Standing on the concrete of November 33
Our fate is totally determined, it is not free
We cracked the nucleus, the glue of physicality
And we've tried to reel in Pandora so frantically
The inability to do so has us acting graphically
We can't overcome it and so we act erratically
Stupidity reigns and the the mistake occurs
Unleashing a successive set of blinding blurs
No wonder the adroit travelers have passed us by
Despite our ability to fly high up into the sky
But that doesn't matter, not a single consideration
The open sky is just another theater of operation
All we understand is sin, death and proliferation
And the concept of dominance by a single nation
The bards have lost faith, the artists are done
Painting optimism is the move that makes one numb
Numb to the fact that we are slaves to negation
To disavow the fact leads to angst and frustration
So write down your thoughts before you say farewell
Welcome all earthlings to the bonfire of nuclear hell
Stoically standing, an ironic landmark on an empty prairie
A barren landscape before and after, it's funny and scary
Fifteen facilities, standing always armed and always ready
Away from the populations centers, a dichotomy so heavy
This is the basest human nature, a weird sort of paradox
Living to the bitter end set to our own watches and clocks
Kenneth Anthony Slaathaug lives in east-central North Dakota, in the heart of America's Cold War Nuclear Missile Defense program. Ken is a tour guide at a former missile silo.
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