I blame Ken MacLeod for the whole thing. It was his idea to argue the old warrior out of retirement, and he suggested the fitness program, too.

Zakalwe enfranchised;_Those lazy curls of smoke above the city,_Black wormholes in the air of noontime's bright Ground Zero._Did they tell you what you wanted to be told?_Or rain-skinned on a concrete fastness,_Fortress island in the flood;_You walked amongst the smashed machines,_And looked through undrugged eyes_For engines of another war,_And an attrition of the soul and the device._With craft and plane and ship,_And gun and drone and field you played, and_Wrote an allegory of your regress_In other people's tears and blood;_The tentative poetics of your rise_From a mere and shoddy grace._And those who found you,_Took, remade you_('Hey, my boy, it's you and us knife missiles now,_Our lunge and speed and bloody secret: _The way to a man's heart is through his chest! )_- They thought you were their plaything,_Savage child; the throwback from wayback_Expedient because_Utopia spawns few warriors._But you knew your figure cut a cipher_Through every crafted plan,_And playing our game for real_Saw through our plumbing jobs_And wayward glands_To a meaning of your own, in bones._- The catchment of these cultured lives_Was not in flesh,_And what we only knew,_You felt,_With all the marrow of your twisted cells.__

Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da" Marenhide.

c/o SC, Year 115 (Earth, Khmer calendar).

Marain original, own translation. Unpublished.