New York Elegy
Speak, O Muse, of the dreamer who sought to make ruins live, who turned the tall spire of commerce to the cramping of homes, yet found the steel spine unyielding, the glass skin a cage of orange haze, where once the Roman stone stood proud in sunlit decay, now the smog of the city burns red and thick, and the view from the ninety-ninth floor shows not the world, but the end of it, a cinema of collapse, where the ghosts of the old world walk unseen, and the single man, alone in his glass box, watches the city breathe its last, while the beams crack and the rods hold, and the inspectors come, and the stop-work order falls like a hammer on the dream, and the dreamer knows, too late, that the tower was never meant to be a home, but a monument to the folly of men who think they can bend the world to their will, and the world, in its turn, bends them back, into the dust, into the silence, into the ruin they sought to escape, for the ancient Roman ruin was a painting by Panini, a capriccio of light and stone where the Colosseum stood in golden air, but this new ruin is a thousand stories of glass and iron, where the light is brown and the air is thick with the breath of a dying beast, and the geometry of the old world, the perfect ratio of the column and the arch, is lost to the cold math of the square foot, where every wall is a ledger and every window a debt, and the dreamers, they cut the girders, they moved the walls, they thought to make a home of the tower, but the tower is a beast that eats its young, and the beams that held the weight of the world now groan under the weight of the dream, and the rods that were meant to hold the concrete are but a thin skin over the rot, and the inspector sees the crack, the hairline fracture in the steel, and he knows that the dream is over, that the tower will fall, or that it will stand as a monument to the folly of men who thought they could live in the sky, and the city below, it watches, it waits, it breathes its orange breath, and the dreamer, he stands in his glass box, he looks out at the end of the world, and he knows that he is the last man, the last man in the last tower, the last dreamer in the last city, and the sun, it sets in a blaze of red and orange, and the night, it comes, and the silence, it is absolute, and the dream, it is over, and the ruin, it is complete, and the Muse, she sings of the fall, of the dreamer, of the tower, of the city, of the end, and the end, it is the beginning, and the beginning, it is the end, and the cycle, it turns, and the dream, it is over, and the ruin, it is complete, and the Muse, she sings, and the song, it is the song of the fall, of the dreamer, of the tower, of the city, of the end, and the end, and it is complete.