if you ask me... I'm not saying that the world is a construct of your mind. I'm saying the opposite: the world exists. Your mind is a construct of the world. Your imagination is an illusion...

I can't hear you. There's too much machine gun fire outside. Hold on a second...

That's better.

No, I can't close the window, the glass is shattered, I taped a newspaper over it to block out the noise...

Newspapers these days have a unique property: they absorb all information such that none can escape...

Actually I'm unemployed, but working on getting hired as a poet...

My parents, before they died, bought me English as a graduation present. It's an outdated version. I hear it has fewer problems than the latest release, but I can't look up some of the newer words...

Recent poetry a friend pirated for me...

No, to be honest, I didn't do well in college as a poet. But when I heard there was a propaganda campaign to quell a populist uprising, I started sending a poem a day to the Pentagon...

Yes, absolutely the best job I can imagine. I'd love to be published in midair like that... But you have to be good. You need to write lines of steel to bend the reader to your uncontestable imagery...

Dropping fire, exactly....

Well, I'm pretty determined to keep writing, as long as there's a potential enemy somewhere...

Linus?

Oh, he did?

Wow, they dropped his poems on Manhattan?

No...

Can't go out dancing tonight, I'm writing, but thanks...

The literati of Harlem or Watts or Detroit gazing at the sky listening to a screaming bomb fall on them. And when it hits, and they are braced for the explosion that could kill them, there is only a quiet rustling of paper, and poetry streaming from the sky like tickertape...

Yeah, but it will take more than poetry to blow