More and more empty words, the tricolour under grey clouds, music, new ways of saying and doing things. You bow, smile, thank, ask questions, vote. But deep inside you a little child’s voice is shouting louder and louder: ‘How did I get here?’
Is this your home or a place of punishment, an alien bleak piece of land set against an alien bleak sea, an alien language and alien people to whom you must return again and again from dreams where you could be on these islands or in China, in Greece, in the West Coast cedar forests? We bow, we smile, we thank, we ask questions. The phone rings, you’re caught by the phone line like a fish by a hook. Was it you somebody wanted to catch or are you just bait for somebody bigger and more important who lives here, on this bleak land in this bleak sea, and who is lured out of the depths by your story, your poem or simply by your despair?
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