DAVE HILLIARD

I awoke next to my wife at 4am
with a terrible feeling of dread
about how me and her and everyone we love could be destroyed at any moment
by nuclear weapons
and I wondered if having that hanging over our heads all of the time
hasn’t driven all of us insane

and I read about how our goverment
makes a token nod towards caring about climate change
and getting clean of this dirty dirty oil addiction we have
whilst simultaenously reconfiguring our military forces
to secure the worlds remaining oil reserves
alongside America

and I watched the morning news
alternate between
abstract atrocities in countries I will never visit
and brain-drain numbskull noise masquerading as entertainment

and for a half second my brain had a horrible, screaming realisation,

thinking-

‘No one is connecting the dots. Because of the way these things are half glimpsed, through the showy media velvet curtains, it makes it that much harder for people to put anything together, to see any pattern in this horror. And because of this, nothing is ever going to change. We can see our own destruction on the horizon, and our response is to turn up the radio and punch the acelerator to the floor’.

but then

I went outside
turned the key in the Ford
half a tank
of the rapidly diminishing North Sea Oil
drove my wife to work
sat in traffic a while
people going to work

and everything was good
everything was normal
the same as it’s ever been
and it was hard to believe my car was changing the climate
that there was a perpetual war somewhere far away for the oil to make it run

and I thought maybe everything will be ok
the same as its ever been.