Changing My Mind About Nukes:
A Palinode
I used to be all about pacifism
Sunshine and flowers and love and peace
And no nukes
Definitely no nukes
When I got on the Internet
My goal was to spread the love
The message of peace
And my belief that no nukes is good nukes
But then I met the bullies
And the haters
And the thought police
And more than plenty
Of this type
Saying mean things about the way people look
Making deliberate rude comments on people's posts
And worst of all, telling people they should kill themselves
It really bothered me how few people seemed to care
That the words of these ill-doers had the potential to do so much harm
I became disillusioned, jaded, my heart turned black
And I started to reconsider my position on nukes
At this point, if we could take all the trolls to an asteroid
And nuke them straight to hell
I'd say give 'em as many megatons as we've got stockpiled
Hell, I'll even push the button
Because these really are terrible people
And I don't see any chance for redemption
You don't deliberately seek to make others feel bad
Or try to push them to kill themselves
Unless you are a really, really shitty excuse for a human being
Thanks for making me change my mind about nukes
I now see that even things that could destroy the planet have redeeming value
As opposed to those of you who tear others down to build yourselves up
Fuck you.
~Naila~
The Prompt:
And now, without further ado, our prompt (optional as always) for Day Eight: today I challenge you to write a palinode. And what’s that? It’s a poem in which the poet retracts a statement made in an earlier poem. You could take that route or, if you don’t have an actual poetically-expressed statement you want to retract, maybe you could write a poem in which you explain your reasons for changing your mind about something.
Notes:
I'm pulling no punches tonight. These bullies and trolls really have my goat, and my goat is extremely angry at being had. I have posted two images below. The first image is glorious, the second is gruesome--and yet darkly, disgustingly humorous. Proceed past the glorious one at your own risk.
Know why we agreed to give this guy the questionable honor of dedicating our site featuring poetry of perhaps highly dubious quality to him?
Because he's always been the total antithesis of the kind of crappy people I wrote the poem about.
Even though his brain's being destroyed by a horrible disease, he's still superior to them in every way, shape and form to their ilk
Anyone who doesn't like the fact that we've done this can...
Seriously. Nobody involved with this project should ever have to be ashamed of their feelings. It seems like so many people are afraid of feeling anything genuine or deep, and it's destroying the world, turning us into a bunch of apathetic or downright hateful monsters.
Do not be ashamed to feel love and to try to do right, even though love sometimes hurts like hell and right is sometimes harder to do than wrong.
