Robert Cooperman

THE HUSNOCK

A Star Trek: Next Generation episode
featured The Husnock: a race of highly
intelligent, incredibly brutal creatures;
but when they tried to destroy a small planet,
they faced the wrath of a previously pacifist
omnipotent being, and when they killed
his mortal wife and everyone else on his planet,
he confessed to Captain Picard
that he’d wiped out all the Husnock.

“What do you mean by all?” Picard,
with growing dread, demanded,
“all of the attacking ships?”

“No,” the being answered, “every last one
of them in the universe, all 50 billion.”

Forgive me, but I’d be tempted: starting
with Putin, his pals, his lick-spittle generals,
then the Russian army, which can't
defeat Ukraine, so is rendering it
into a giant, rubble-strewn body bag;
then every Russian who fell for
Putin’s bullshit propaganda, and then...

“You’d be doing,” you’d accuse, “exactly
what psycho-Putin and his goons did.”

If I were a better man, I’d agree.
But I’m not, so allow me my impotent
fantasy-rage, because at this point,
good riddance to bad fucking garbage.


Gerald So's YouTube video reading of "The Husnock":



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Bob confesses: "A few days before I wrote this poem, I was talking to a likewise Star Trek: Next Generation loving-friend and I remembered the episode with The Husnock, a race of utter brutes who really get theirs. I'd mentioned in passing that I wished someone would do a Husnock on Putin and his cronies and generals and the Russian army and all of them. The idea for a poem about the Russian invaders as present-day Husnock, and what Russia deserved, percolated in my head until it hit me how the poem had to go. It's kind of a riff on the thought game we played as kids: if you could go back in time and had total omnipotence, could you bring yourself to kill Hitler? Hell yeah."


ROBERT COOPERMAN's latest collections are Go Play Outside (Apprentice House) and Reefer Madness (Kelsay Books). Forthcoming from Kelsay Books is A Nightmare on Horseback.