5 Ways to Kill a man

For reasons i can't explain this is one of my favorite pieces of poetry, written by Edwin Brock. To make it have the full impact it had on me, read it as if you were reading a recipe:

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it.
To do this properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see
that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

Chilling isn't it? It's soo emotionless as the poet uses the language of a practical manual to explore humanity's cruelty. Progress is reduced to the way in which mankind has "improved" its methods of killing.

How many people did it take to crucify a person? Then...how many did it take to drop the Hiroshima bomb? Horrifying isn't it? As the centuries pass and the era changes, it becomes easier to kill a man. What Brock said was entirely true. The easiest way to kill a man is to leave him in the middle of the 20th century.

Man creates their own conflicts and struggles and resolve to guns to solve the issue. "Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed." Hmm....having a war for peace..isn't that ironic? It like that T-shirt quote that goes "Bombing for peace is like f*cking for virginity."