Culture 04 – Use of Weapons – Banks, Iain

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Published: 1990. ISBN: 1 85723 135 X

· ‘Slight Mechanical Destruction’

I blame Ken MacLeod for the whole thing. It was his idea to argue the old warrior out of retirement, and he suggested the fitness program, too.

‘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,

(‘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

Utopia spawns few warriors.

But you knew your figure cut a cipher