Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons - Slight Mechanical Destruction lyrics

'Slight Mechanical Destruction' Zakalwe enfranchised; Those lazy curls of smoke above the city, Black wormholes in the air of noontime's bright Ground Zero. Did they tell you what you wanted to be told? Or rain-skinned on a concrete fastness, Fortress island in the flood; You walked amongst the smashed machines, And looked through undrugged eyes For engines of another war, And an attrition of the soul and the device. With craft and plane and ship, And gun and drone and field you played, and Wrote an allegory of your regress In other people's tears and blood; The tentative poetics of your rise From a mere and shoddy grace. And those who found you, Took, remade you ('Hey, my boy, it's you and us knife missiles now, Our lunge and speed and bloody secret: The way to a man's heart is through his chest!') -They thought you were their plaything, Savage child; the throwback from wayback Expedient because Utopia spawns few warriors. But you knew your figure cut a cipher Through every crafted plan, And playing our game for real Saw through our plumbing jobs And wayward glands To a meaning of your own, in bones. - The catchment of these cultured lives Was not in flesh, And what we only knew, You felt, With all the marrow of your twisted cells. Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da'Marenhide. c/o SC, Year 115 (Earth, Khmer calendar). Marain original, own translation. Unpublished.