Infinite Power

I love you. I do. I'm not joking. I get your pain. I feel it. You're trapped by corruption. That's it. No way out. Every day talking heads tell you. Every day you're told you're nothing. You don't count.

You worked fingers to the bone. You did everything you were told. But they took your job. Took your house. Split your family.

You're a loser. Everything tells you this. No-one looks in your eyes, calls you sir or ma'am. You've been trashed. Except in the bar. Running up a tab on the credit card you can't pay. Every month you need more booze, more drugs to numb the pain. You have no choice. By next year you'll either be dead or deeper in debt.

At school they told you, study, work hard, and you'll be rich. On the way up, take the punches, you'll win in the end. Keep fighting. Men will fear you, and babes will line up to get into your bed.

They lied. They all lied. They made a fool of you. You can't win. They can't lose. You…

Infinite Power, in Vickers eyes “is not a zero sum game  but a journey / a stone thrown in a lake / circular ripples emanating outward” and the danger of our age is that we have lost contact with that power, made it something to possess  like a personal bank account. In writing these poems she  hopes for a reconnection to that sacred universal relationship.
Janet Vickers’s book of poetry, entitled Infinite Power,  has such an accurate title for this is an important, brave and,  indeed, powerful gathering of poems. She is on a search, a  compelling search, that draws the reader along with her as  she questions accepted concepts, ploughs through mankind’s  inhumanity and even tears nature apart in her quest for a core of hope amidst despair. “The distant bird singing,” as she puts it. This need to give reason for continuance is evidenced in  Vickers startling fresh and demanding metaphors and her  piercing questions. Hope comes in the last few words—“love  everyone, hate no-one, move t…

"Well over 250 million people died in the 20th Century as a result of political violence. This includes an estimated 200 million deaths that were the result of people killed intentionally by governments, and perhaps fifty million deaths as the result of warfare. Among governments that were the most prolific in murdering people were the communist USSR, China and the Mao Guerillas, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and of course Nazi Germany." Hitler, War - and the Holocaust. Richard Koenigsberg.

The complete essay needs to be read as Koenigsberg reveals how violence breeds violence.  It appears to arrive from the idea that young men are born to experience the glory of running out on the battlefield to be gunned down.

Dying on the battlefield has mostly been portrayed as sudden death but that's not how it happens all the time or most of the time.  Sometimes they lie on the field in excruciating pain - intestines falling from a gaping wound, arms and legs blown off, eyes ripped out, face…