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

I lock it in a box, and drop it here  

at the corner of this beach:  

a stretch of scruffy sand, swimmers  

all gone, one solitary dog walker snapping sticks  

into the wind. 

Then I sit here and listen – 

my voice in a box sounds different  

from here, outside of me and bobbing  

on the choppy waves. 

Sounds thinner, stranger, out of its element. 

But mostly, I like the way I forget it, sometimes for hours. 

So I hear only waves  

bringing other people’s lives to this edge  

of sand. A clank of a bottle;  

an old shirt’s flailing arms;  

rope, old rope; one battered shoe, laceless, open,  

in a tangle of bladderwrack. 

Or sometimes there’s just silence,  

and I like that too.  

The feeling inside it that I could begin  

with a new voice all over again. 

Every one of my words,  

salty, rinsed and glittering.