[verse]

All bets are off

for the first time in decades

The giants of the northern hemisphere

stand unmoored, unbound, unrestrained.

The U.S. and Russia now drift with no limits

on their fire power, no treaty stitched guardrails

to keep the world from quaver. Good luck is not forever.

The last great pact expired today, ending a half century

of thin threaded hope. A door slams shut behind us,

and the echo is louder than the blast to come.

NATO is dividing

And Germany builds it forces

We enter the epoch of Fat Boy Inc.,

the age of irrational thermonuclear exuberance

Or do we

Where prophets need not be Isaiah or Cassandra

no Christ or Muhammad no Buddha no Jehovah

To read the writing scorched across the sky.

The Doomsday Clock ticks its iron knuckles

against the glass.

The face is about to break

closer to midnight than ever,

eighty- five -seconds- from- the -dark.

To shrug and say no big deal

is a sin of staggering proportion.

Billions stand on the lip of oblivion,

unaware they are already falling.

Forget the famine that follows the flash,

the ash choked harvests,

the silent oceans.

Seventy thousand suns could rise at once

and none would warm us.

Deterrence becomes a snake eating its tail

our adversaries’ terror

reborn as our own undoing.

We expand the arsenal

as if extinction were a patriotic duty.

We need no Parousia,

no Revelation trumpets,

no horsemen galloping from ancient scrolls.

The human species is perfectly capable

of ending itself without divine assistance.

Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant.

Those who are about to die

salute the indifferent empire of flame.

Climate risk and nuclear war

twin blades at our throats

poised to extinguish our species

from the destructive soul of our planet.

And the Doomsday

Clock at MIT

keeps ticking,

keeps warning,

keeps whispering

[chorus]

Tick-

Tock-

Tick -

Tock -

Soon- the- hands -will -stop

Time is no longer on our side.

tick-toc..