Fragment

            This time the hold-up man
didn't know a video-sound camera hidden up in a corner

            was recording what was
before it or more likely he didn't care, opening up with his pistol,

            not saying a word, on the
clerk you see blurredly falling and you hear--I keep hearing--

            crying, "God, God," in
that voice I was always afraid existed within us, the voice that knows

            beyond illusion the
irrevocability of death, beyond any dream of being not mortally injured--

            "You're just falling
asleep, someone will save you, you'll wake again, loved ones beside you.
..."

            Nothing of that: even torn
by the flaws in the tape it was a voice that knew it was dying,

            knew it was
being--horrible--slaughtered, all that it knew and aspired to instantly
voided;

            such hopeless, astonished
pleading, such overwhelmed, untempered pity for the self dying;

            no indignation, no passion
for justice, only woe, woe, woe, as he felt himself falling,

            even falling knowing
already he was dead, and how much I pray to myself I want not, ever,

            to know this, how much I
want to ask again why I must, with such perfect, detailed precision,

            know this, this anguish,
this agony for a departing self wishing only to stay, to endure,

            knowing all the while
that, having known, I always will know this torn, singular voice

            of a soul calling "God!"
as it sinks back through the darkness it came from, cancelled, annulled.