An Architect's Notions of The City
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The lights of the city,
reflect brilliance on their wine glasses,
the glows from the masses,
of high-rising corporate towers, topped with winking peaks of beacons,
rivers of head and tail lights,
merging into a unified iridescence,
playing among the delicate, slender stems,
as champagne bubbles race, twine, laugh, behind clicking, frosted crystals.
-
Ten years ago, he would pause work in his cubicle,
accept a black coffee,
pushed out by a assistant of a whirring silver and bronze automaton,
claws bound with steel manacles,
gather his notebook, stroll down the winding,
ammonia-permeated halls,
to the far porthole window.
-
From the barren, starving desert, thousands of mechanical, fixated eyes and spindled ligaments,
spiked forth steel beams,
foundations paved, concrete sloshing from chutes and churns that never ceased,
his creations, enshrined upon curled paper with what remained of his pen ink,
plans of grandeur, passed under a electric eye,
from which signals darted, flicked, through transmission towers and wires, arcing high,
jolting down the electrified skeletons of skyscrapers, tended to by those machines,
it was upon his own beasts of burden,
that he built the city.
-
The people came,
captivated by promises of wealth, gains, fortunes of incomprehensible magnitudes,
They were, however, swindled by the casinos, beaten by the thugs, what meager money and ambitions gone,
the city took, and the city left them,
slaving away in jumpsuits, under the harsh fluorescent glow of the service tunnels,
starving and destitute.
-
From his high perch in the Starlight Lounge,
furnished with the finest leather armchairs and tables made from delicately inlaid birch brown,
the fizz of the champagne flowed, soothed his lips,
cooled his throat, lingered on his tongue.
The automatons had long fallen dead, remains carted off beyond the far reaches of the city,
cast into the waste pits, picked by scavengers,
oozing motor oil, hydraulic fluid, trickling away, pooling into the rot.
-
Watching the lights of the city,
reflect, merge, and move, bright on his and Edwina's wine glass,
the glow of the masses,
of high rising corporate towers and rivers of head and tail lights,
bulbs, faces, screens, veins, merging into one, shimmering, fighting upwards against the night’s black,
he wonders, he smiles, he laughs,
for it wasn’t the machines who were at the mercy of his city,
instead of those mechanical, fixated eyes and spindled ligaments,
it was men, composed of flesh, bone, blood,
condemned to toil beneath its depths,
for all eternity.

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