Indifference is far more efficient
than fission or fusion
as a weapon of mass destruction,
and far less problematic
than uranium or tritium
to procure, occurring,
as it does, massively in nature.
It can kill at a distance,
and without a delivery system,
whole populations, soundlessly
and without fallout
or damage to infrastructure,
or kill up close, sparing
at your option, selected citizens.
So refined is its stealthing
that its gradual arrival
over the horizon
from everywhere and nowhere
seems, even to victims,
like a kind of self-destruction,
thus offering
first-strike capability
with near-zero risk
of blowback or retaliation.
With no moving parts
at all, it will function
across multiple continents
indefinitely without maintenance.
Running on the one
endlessly renewable resource,
i.e., Lack of Energy,
it is what it is,
will be what it will be,
doing the nothing that it does
for centuries and centuries.
James Richardson is most recently the author of For Now. Within the Hour, his new and selected poems and aphorisms, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in Fall/Winter 2026. He lives on a wooded hillside in central New Jersey. Visit AboutJamesRichardson.com.
