When I tread beneath

The uniform windows

Of that Layered City,

Admiring how their

Unsettling symmetry

Was like a spectacle of

Some Playmobil empire,

I saw the clever frames

High enough to blur

Faces,

The plastic towers

Built to shelter

Real life disgraces.

 

 

Blending in and sticking out

In all the wrong dimensions,

The lonely windows are

Pinned to an open sky

Like the wide-set eyes

Of a monolithic giant

And are too compliant

Too hollow

To shelter real life.

If only they could lean

A little closer

But the state built slab

Is a strange beast.

 

 

Each high-rise home

Then appeared to me

As another reprise of

Synthesised cohersion,

A structured perversion;

As office pews

At lunch hour,

Or the vacuous space

In a barren bookcase;

Colourless and imposing.

 

 

And though pinned above me

Those alloted window panes

Strapped to the narrow frames

Of a faceless foundation,

Seemed to be the concrete

Illustration

Of an obligation to Nation,

I hear

‘There is much more,

on the inside’