Looking For You! Poem by David Lewis Paget

I woke one day to hear them say
That they'd atom bombed Iran,
There was no more threat from them, they said,
There was no more Teheran,
They said all their enrichment plants
Would be dead for a thousand years,
‘It's a win for the common man, ' they said
In some logic, so perverse!

But the Nuclear powers got itchy then
And took out Pakistan,
‘There'll be no more al-Qaeda,
There'll be no more Taliban! '
Then North Korea shot their bolt
And dropped a bomb on Seoul,
In revenge for the war of ‘50
It was becoming a free for all!

Then Beijing took out Tokyo
For the Daiyou Islands spat,
‘Remember the Rape of old Nanjing?
There'll be no more of that! '
While Hamas firing rockets made
Israelis cross the line,
The next we heard was a nuclear bomb
Had wiped out Palestine.

The Saudi's wiped out Cairo
To get rid of the Brotherhood,
And Moscow, taking a punt
Destroyed Berlin, for well and good.
New York was gone in a flash of light
And London, just the same,
While Moscow's simply a glowing night
On a radioactive plain.

Sydney went, and Melbourne too,
Though we don't know how or why,
We thought that we'd have been safe down here
‘Til we looked up at the sky,
New Zealand sank beneath the sea
With just Rotorua left,
Built up to a huge volcano
Spewing lava along its crest.

So when my cell phone rang, I thought
‘Is there anybody there? '
I hadn't seen anyone round for days
Since the world had gone quite spare!
A message popped up on the screen
‘I love you, John, it's me! '
But I didn't know who the caller was,
It was signed with the letter - ‘B'.

I tried to call the number back
But I only got a hum,
There wasn't even a ring tone,
Wasn't a service I could phone,
I put it out of my mind and thought:
‘The thing is to survive,
I need to head for the bush if I'm
Determined to stay alive.'

The following day it rang again
And the message there was clear:
‘I need you John, are you going to come
And rescue me, my dear? '
I scratched my head in bemusement
But no thoughts would come to me,
I didn't know anyone in the world
That signed with the letter ‘B'.

I squatted in an empty house
In the village of Gulnare,
Everyone else had gone away
There were empty houses spare,
The village shop supplied my needs
So I thought that I would bide,
To see if a radioactive cloud
Would blanket the countryside.

The cell rang every other day
It fairly drove me spare,
There wasn't a way to answer it
To tell her that I was there,
And I hoped she'd finally let me know
Just where she was phoning from,
But all she'd said, and it rang in my head
Was ‘I love you, love you, John! '

Perhaps she was the love of my life
That I'd known, and cast aside,
Always in search of the perfect girl
When I wanted a perfect bride,
She seemed so lonely, phoning me
From the great wide world out there,
How could I tell her that I was stuck
In the village of Gulnare?

The final message arrived before
My batteries died, went flat,
I couldn't recharge, the lines were down
So I thought that that was that!
My heart sank into my boots, she'd said
Where she was, and that so far,
For ‘B' was stuck in a tiny town
In the depths of Iowa! '

David Lewis Paget