Monologue inside Breughel’s first Tower of Babel
the colonists always pack old spectres and memory, mad apparition, peers through cracks in day
we scatter into, our words ascending across air… and once that’s out, silence
fllas like love, but permanent, empires lying dormant (unstuffed toys) we’ll kiss the photographs flat when gone
while wrong-headed statues promise nothing yet to the gods new foregrounds arrive, unrecognizable