/lit/ - Literature

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 among the smashed machines,
and looked trough 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 trough 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
trough every crafted plan,
and playing our game for real
saw trough 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.

>Ctrl-F use of weapons
>Phrase not found

The Culture series by Iain M Banks.

>>5931177
>He tried not to remember what the great ship was called. Instead he saw the
>ship somehow installed near the middle of a city, and felt confused, and
>could not work out how it got there. The ship started to look like a castle,
>for some reason, and that did, and did not, make sense. He began to feel
>fright-ened. The ship's name was like some huge sea creature, bumping into
>the hull of his boat; like a battering-ram thudding into the walls of the castle
>keep. He tried to block it out, knowing it was just a name but not wanting to
>hear it because it always made him feel bad.
>He put his hands over his ears. That worked for a moment. But then the
>ship, set in stone, near the centre of the battered city, fired its great guns,
>gouting black and flashing yellow-white, and he knew what was coming, and
>tried to scream to cover the noise, but when it arrived it was the name of the
>ship that the guns had spoken, and it shattered the boat, demolished the
>castle, and resounded through the bones and spaces of his skull, like the
>laughter of an insane god, forever.

>The light went out then, and he sank gratefully away from the awful,
>accusing sound.
>Light.
>Staberinde
>said a calm voice from somewhere inside.
>Staberinde. It's
>only a word.
>The Staberinde. The ship. He turned away from the light, back into the
>darkness.

MFW I have the audio book on my MP3 player with each chapter as a separate track on shuffle.