Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

Don’t think I don’t know
who you are.
Not even the soul
takes such a trajectory,
not even the cruise missile
on its flyby of El Rashid Street
flies so flat, homing in
under the sea’s radar,
and what are you anyway
but a deathstar flicked by a
warrior-saint, a penny pitched
at the busker’s guitar-case,
its blue silks opened
like a street autopsy?

So don’t think I’m afraid to say
you bring the dusk with you
and all the limestone twilights
between Gwter Cyrn y Locs and Gwter y Cwn.
dragging the west behind you
on fairground wings.

Because there’s nothing else
that sounds like you and there’s nothing else
that looks like you
and there’s never been anything
that waits like you,
more patient than oil
in the departure lounges
under the sea-bed.

You’re midnight’s glove-puppet,
sentinel at the cavemouth,
something plumed and glassy-eyed
about you from the broom cupboard
of Porthcawl museum,
yet there you perch, on the capstan
by the quayside bodega
speaking the Arabic
of the corsairs, ventriloquist
of every cry that waits behind the dark.

Salt-water cockerel,
your oiled carcass floats
by the jetty. Is there no-one who
will sweep away your blood’s
black videotape?

But here you come again,
stealth-bomber out of the empty
quarter, trailing your own death
across the sky, in your heart
the ashes of American astronauts,
your forgiveness one black feather
taking a lifetime to drift
down from the stratosphere.