It had a semi-human face
Distilled on screens,
This thing that speaks in our name,

An approximation of something
Let loose on the world
And this is what it keeps on saying —

'You will pay for what I did to you
Again and again and again'


*

A piece of earth comes flying.
Somewhere it had a name
Lost in the folds of a map.
Ownership thickened around it.

Now, walking down the street,
There's a kind of uneasy exaltation
And bullets in your mouth are words.

I imagine this piece of earth
As if the words might take me
Some of the way with you

Bullets made of earth came flying


*

J'ai une extinction de voix:
This was the singer.
They have taken out his voice,
It must have been a mistake,
The voice that speaks itself in a whisper
Just an inch above the ground.

Hold the microphone close to his face,
Enlarge the possibilities of speech —
Is it to get inside someone's skin
Like something borrowed, when
He offers you his throat?

'I am the singer with the ruined face
The one that looks like history
Grown hard to recognise
But how can you sit and watch like that?'

He is the news from nowhere
Who met with an accident of time
And pieces of earth came flying.

'So I shall return to something
As near to me as my name?
Is this the new-created world
Stained with blood like sunrise?'

Lives half guessed-at
Who imagine this piece of earth
And people it with trees,
A sound here and there, as of running water,
Scents, seasons.
It is somewhere inside a map,

A map furled like a flag,
The enormous dream of history
We cannot wake from.
And where on the earth does he find that voice?

I'll stay alone at the edge and wonder
How it might be for once to be all voice
Arrive here on the page,
Such privileged existence.