But unlike me, the world let them go. Unlike me, their time was at an end, and the umbilical gave way, and they passed over, to a place where they refuse to remember.

*

Tell me if’n youse know this one, sonne’t:

The Dead Zone: The Place Of Endless Echoes is written’t

in lingo, on the face of the

eartH:_aitch

is the invisible’t letter of the

English’t alpHa-betical

as Hierophanet sHe is voiceless, as Heth she is:

bars, fences, divide’t aires,

barbe’t wires,

is a stranger Here, Her-self,

is closes’t to Her, as worde’t

on the battlefiel’t,

brave’t boyes.

*

I was visited by Miracle Baby during the final months of the hunger strike. He died, of a brain haemorrhage, in the streets of the Ardoyne, the same week Bobby Sands was elected as the Right Honourable Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. He came to me that night, in a vision, and he says that he had known, all along, that he had looked into my heart, and read its contents, and that he gave me permission, he reached out and he touched Himself on the head, and he let it be known that it was okay, that I had done what my heart had asked of me, and that now I was moving into a new phase of my life, a new phase that nobody could have predicted but that would require the killing of something inside of me, the erasing of something, deep down, and I knew then, after Miracle Baby had withdrawn his hand from my forehead, his hand from which an extra pinkie grew out of the centre at an angle of ninety degrees (what is love is), that I was capable of my own great sacrifice, though perhaps you will not think so, perhaps you will not think it any sacrifice at all, but from that day forth I can tell you that my relationship changed with the guards and with the speaking of the words, and that I was moved out of my cell and began to enjoy certain benefits, certain indulgences, so that in the wake of the hunger strike and the pointless death of ten young men, ten young men that are now invisible and that achieved nothing but History, I was part of a select group that came to an understanding with the other side and so became aware, for the first time, of the true nature of my powers. I asked you earlier if you could work it out, now can you? Can you guess what my superpower might be?

*