During the second age of machines, in the island nations far across the East Ocean, there lived a young poet. As a boy, he would sit at his desk while the teacher spoke at length of dead men and dead languages, his head down, writing furiously. His lesson books were not filled up with notes, for every page was a poem, and he left no room for aught else. Every day, in every class, he wrote a poem, and week by week he told stories. Some of these he shared with his classmates, and some of his classmates wrote their own poems and stories in turn.

The poet grew from a boy to a young man in this way. He dutifully answered all the questions from all the tests in every class. He did all that was asked of him, and when he came of age he left the school to go out into the world. But in the second age of machines, there was no call for poets. All throughout the city there were machines, and all of these machines demanded the hands of men to keep them running. The poet’s words fell from his pages onto deaf ears and blind eyes.

So the poet closed his notebooks and put away his pens and went to work for the machines. They would leave their traces of black soot about his eyes, and black grease on his hands, but every evening he would sit by the light of a single candle and write again. Sometimes he still saw the men who had read his poems when they were all young students, but none of these men were poets anymore. Like all men, they had turned to the machines, and the skies became black with smoke.

It took no small amount of time before the poet became disgusted with his work for the machines, and soon he was convinced there was not only no place in the world for a poet, but there was simply no room left for poetry. Perhaps he was right. A great war had begun amongst the island nations, fracturing them down the middle. The grand machines men had made were set to the purpose of assembly-line death. They turned the earth to mud, they turned the air sickly and yellow, and they spit death across ruined farmlands.

Every day, the poet would find news of the great war, and sometimes he would even catch the scent of death and decay on the air. It carried for miles and none of the island nations could escape it. The burden of those men lost in the mud and rain fell heavily on the shoulders of everyone during the time of the great war, and the poet felt himself growing so stooped he could no longer bear to turn his face to the sky.

One lonely night he stared at the grease on his hands and the soot on his face for many hours. He did not clean these marks of the machines from his body, as was his usual habit, but went straight to his shelf, where he kept volume upon volume of poetry he wrote for himself, and which the world seemed not to need. He lit a candle, took the first volume down from the shelf, and page by page he fed it into the fire. As each of his poems burned, he felt the weight lessen. The poet burned away the whole night, and when the morning touched the sky, every last poem was gone. He stood straight again, and left his job to join the army. All he brought with him was a bottle of ink and a brush.

The poet became a soldier, and was given a rifle. They sent him into the long trenches to die with hundreds of other young men. Death lived in the earth and sky there, on those contested lines. It fell from above, it seeped in through the water, and he watched other men die through the fogged lens of a gas mask. The young soldier had come to the great war to end his life, to feed himself directly into the gaping maw of a world which ate the hearts of men. But now that he stood on its cusp, it seemed to him all the machines of death wished to do was toy with him, to eat his fear, and leave him stripped but still living.

The soldier determined that, though he was willing to surrender his life, he would surrender nothing else. Thus the soldier became a poet once again. “Every bullet,” he said to no one, “bears the name of a man. There are twice and half again as many bullets as men in this world, enough that there is a bullet for all living things.” With this declaration he dug out a bullet from his satchel, and from his pockets he took his brush and pen. Carefully, while machineguns spat raw metal overhead, he wrote his name and his story on the bullet. He put the bullet into his jacket pocket, and so he knew where his death resided - with him, always.

The poet, afterwards, had no fear. No bullets could bear his name. Death could not touch him and he tamed the trenches with words. When the sun went down over the battlefield, he would sit by candlelight as he had long ago in his room, unafraid of snipers, and write poems on all his bullets. Every poem, he said, was somebody’s name, and somebody’s story. Every poem was a life, and when he spent each round, the poems were gone forever. He did not know if the bullets ever found the lives writ upon them. The poet did not care, for those that missed their mark were lives that would be spared, and those that struck down another soldier would be poems completed. His place in this war was not to hold the strings of fate, only to tell the story.

One day, the great war was over. The poet returned to the city where he had been born, been a child, and become a man. He carried the bullet with his name on it, and a bag of stories that clinked as he walked. The war left a scar in the earth and in the hearts of men. When the poet opened the door to his empty home, a curious feeling came over him, almost as if he had the same weight all his poems once left on his shoulders, but they no longer made him stooped and downcast. He lined up each bullet on the windowsill and looked out over a city, still gray with the ash of machines, but different in its aspect. It was a city holding its breath. It was a world that needed poetry again.

He fell to writing, giving his words over to a world that, after endlessly feeding its children into the machines, was left with a hunger for poems. For every bullet he fired in battle, a new poet took up the pen. Those lives inscribed in poetry and spent in battle found themselves forever entwined with the life of the poet.

For each bullet on his windowsill the poet wrote a story, until all the bullets were gone save his own. This one he kept, and if he has not lost it, he is still alive to this day.