We must watch a thousand towers collapse
Before our first structure rises
Precarious
Polychromatic
Above the littered nursery floor.
We stoop to conquer
And to surrender.
Gravity vanquishes ten times the cities
violence ever could.
How many impossible palaces never stand free of our fingers?
A lonely outpost dreads the coming horde.
Babylon, Alexandria, Rome.
Our monuments are all afternoon ancient, half sunk.
In the scattered ruins lie
every skyscraper yet to rise
above a metropolis some millenia away.