The Final Quatrain

I built a massive city with you.

Large structures, tall buildings, open spaces, gardens, restaurants, bars, alley ways, parking lots and I marked them all with cryptic words, undecipherable to the rest of the world. I don't know if you remember the marks. I did what we couldn't in the real world. Illusion is the first of all pleasures. So in the specificity of the design of our city I included all your idiosyncrasies. It was a beautiful mesh of all our basics: color, taste and touch.

I built the axis of the city. The tallest tower. I built it and I gave it to you. I stocked it up with silken robes. I lit warm fires inside. I never stayed there, but as a guest. I preferred looking up at you. I preferred believing you were closer to the sun than I was.

I built an altar for you. As a compliment to the tower. A celebration of you, for the world. I felt selfish about keeping you to myself. It was the first thing that started to rot when the city began to decay.

I built walls, all around. Defending the city from everything around. When the day came, I couldn't. But the walls worked for a while. Till you wanted to stay within them. They even looked aesthetic.

I built roads to lead you out. I built carriages to bring you in. I carved poetry on the walls that I built to remind you of why we built the city in the first place.

Why did we build this city? We agreed that we both had different conceptions of what a city should be than the rest of the world. But it became difficult to build a functional unit in isolation from the rest of the world. So I started leaving, always to return.

Last when I returned it was at your behest.

The city has suffered since then. You haven't tended to it. I've come back and waited for too long and the isolation that I built is unbearable without its cause. So I am leaving the city. Not how it is. Because it breaks my heart to see it rot. I will destroy everything that you abandoned. I will not let my poems on your walls decay. I will tear it down, stone by stone. I won't make the place virginal again, but I will make it unlike our city. And I will erase the mention of it. So that those try to build a city do not fear the attempt.

The story of decay is sad and long. It belongs to an idealist and his muse. It's really a story of how the world was right. Nothing worth knowing about.

I feel a lack of ability in trying to conclude this in soothing verse, and so in brusque prose I declare, that this is the final quatrain, of poetry, in motion, over all the walls of the city that was spoken of.