MEASURE OF MAN

At the twilight hour,
standing atop this fearful symmetry
I contemplate the palaces of art
and the stairway to heaven,
feel the air’s buoyancy as I watch
the traffic tail-lights three thousand feet below:
this world, a miniature menagerie.

The forests have been decimated,
no tigers roam there,
the hawk is just an outdated fighter craft
finding a corner in a museum basement.
The naked shingles of the ocean is a distant sound.
The dolphins call no more.
Forsaken and desolate are the gardens.
Only, cities catacomb end to end:
towers, tunnels, bridges, roads, connecting
nothing with nothing.
People swarming, jostling, running, clenching, clinching,
filling, pushing, shoving, tripping, falling, connecting
nothing with nothing.

The vision is fed
into an auto-run machine and locked.
The brain, the nerves, the heart
are scanned and wired and clocked.
The future prognosticated and docked.
In short, the clock chimes
of nothing else but good times.

MEASURE OF MAN

Only, like a glitch in a program that has long overtaken the will,
fleetingly, and always at the twilight hour,
the horror of this ungodly symmetry sends a chill.