Neo-brutalist condos and hotels
face off the ocean’s rising roars
like Cyclopes-hewn stones
piled up into battlements
without charm and without rhyme
but with countless hollow eyes
where even the sun is ground
into utter soullessness,
and through these jaws,
streams of captive crowds
pass weighed in the glitz
of golden entwined chains
to add to the wealth and pride
of the drugged and dragged
into the Halls of Hell.
And right on the shore,
a solitary man walks by,
carrying all he is,
without minding much,
a shell of many, vainly filled
with claps of long-dead sounds,
from which pearls to go
with the necks of other wives
they used to sell from stands
by the roads in heat and dust.
