reading aloud to me       was like        early speech        emulators I remember       as a teenager copying        strings of characters and phrases          the computer could speak inhumanly                in strangely accented letters                    to impress my friends           saying the words           how clever it was

sometimes    I would experiment with      unnatural clusters      sessions of beatbox consonants      without vowels      clipped and guttural       typing in dk dp gk bp and hitting enter             for kick drums         and a triggered snare            tchk            could be rolled over tchkchkchk    although the high frequency      phonemes screamed         metallic to me resembling a crash    tssshh       or ride cymbal     tss     or a sequence       dp  ch  gkg  ts stuck in a loop

I couldn’t work out           if the spaces            translated into            measure                or time in any      controllable way      or if the     semblance of verisimilitude     had once come out of a human mouth               or was just              a performance piece encoded            with the software          finding out its voice

it had been fun         but less  and     less      and     command prompts         didn’t fit in with the way we thrashed          and trashed      the punch-pocked    plasterboard     schoolrooms always  practising

the episode             replayed this too                  in the monotone              unerring evenness of delivery            bypassing the studio effects               the equalisation                stuck in mind to leave just                the hook of the poem                    finding its pulse            with anyone free to listen