Ivory Tower Disease (White Plague)

Fastened to a plain that limits their perception
They’re the ones that seek to rise up off the ground
Always seeming to find perfection in every cloud
They are building higher just to see what goes on below

Trying to create a cleaner theater
Housing solitary audiences
To unsuspecting actors
Spectators becoming skeptic fools so easily
Persuaded by simplicity: calming space and ‘purity.’
Minimalist divinity is a mystic’s faith in less distraction.

Oh, to be high and ever so hollow.
These are the isolated ones–
Mute and troubled.

A raided room is a segregate tomb–
That is where they feed the wound:
A surrogate womb.

They shut the doors
And raped the locks.
Their blank walls stare.
Their tables talk.

Still up there the pictures
Tend to speak a thousand words
But there they’re always
Monochrome and monotone.

Towers tall escape commotion
Where it’s hard to see
Vicariously.

Jungles in the Sky

Each plant had
four walls:
no roofs.
The ground under wheels
a recycled plastic, with
paths made of flat carpet.

No more windows
Except on the screens
- just a door-like space
made because a wall
was a bit smaller than the
other three;
and another is barely visible
because of the reincarnated trees:
the ones that grow so high even the
hawks fear to fly to the peaks;
they grow atop the fake wood veneer
of four-drawer chopping blocks.

Jungles in the sky
where each plant is exotic
(or at least in the
eye of the ant):
where the beasts roar
when rubbed the
wrong way
and only the meek
survive.