The Tower

Oh, look how you have killed, how you have killed that magnificent beast to build the tower of your fever dreams. The beast has fallen bloody on the earth whose dark soil now dries red. The tower grows, imitating that ancient spire that sought to reach the gods, but unknowingly, unwittingly, while all your glittering wit whittles at the wood that once fed you, clothed you, loved you. Is there a beast more pitiful than the one who does not know its own nature? Yes: the one whose ivory you stole to build a fool’s tower towards a fool’s paradise. Flies flit around that magnificent form, putrefied, purified, which the earth alone will mourn like a mother cradling her lifeless child. But the beast will return to that eternal womb—it is you who will lose, who have lost, your way. Flames sputter out across the sky. You do not notice, you never have. The tower casts a shadow across the sun while you, resplendent against those seeping rays, mistake that brightness for your own. The sun of genius nurtures fruits of knowledge, but not of wisdom. The sun of the earth nurtures creatures whose ivory you will steal. The tower grows. I watch its shadow spill across the earth.