I love the mushroom cloud.

I don’t think it’s cool. It doesn’t make me feel manly. I don’t worship it for its might.

I love it because it’s an undeniable, undisguisable, irredeemable scar on the face of human complicity. The flash may have burned your eyes out, but you will remember the vision of fait accompli for the rest of your miserable, impotent life.

The capabilities of repression in our kind are staggering. We can suppress the knowledge of recurring massacres, worldwide. We can deny the obvious fact that we’re polluting our way into oblivion until the acid rain eats away our façades. We can bury the pestilent memory of repeated sexual abuse so deep it becomes just another fire that drives us on as we convince ourselves that we’re chasing our goals - not running from our demons.

Not so with the mushroom cloud. One mention and the banter, the machismo, the faux humour - it all stops dead. Fait accompli. The Bomb is an undeniable icon to the obscenities we’ll do to each other - to ourselves, should it come to that. Verity. Terminal accountability. The Bomb is complicity transubstantiated.

I wear a radiation hazard badge on my coat lapel. I’ve got an H-bomb cloud over my bed. I’m a student of Duck and Cover; a thermonuclear zealot. I’m reeducating myself to look directly at the atrocities and let them char my optical nerve; to understand what we’re doing, how we do it, and in the end, why…

Why? Because we live in an era of information poisoning and rationalisation floods. We’re so deeply immersed in faecal grey matter that most of us go through life without ever conceiving anything worth being honest about.

So don’t you fucking shake your head and say you can’t understand why the self-proclaimed president of the free world grins in wanton stupidity as he gibbers the orders that will mean death and desolation for millions. Don’t you sigh at suicide bombers as if you’ve never felt the need for that unequivocal certainty - the absolute trajectory of life. Don’t rile and kick out at rapists and molesters under the pretence of indignation. You’re just as guilty as everyone else. Just as soiled, as corrupt - as shaped and controlled. Just as human.

The future is right here, my loath equals in anathema, and it’s so bright it won’t matter how deep you’ve buried your head.

Me, I’m basking in the light of a thousand suns.