They raised their spires on self-serving lies,
Stole rivers and felled forests for their gain.
Each stone entombed the silence of what dies,
While restless roots below prepared to reclaim.

I drifted through the avenues of ash and dust,
Where shadows gathered in the cracks of time.
Bronze faces wept beneath a burnished crust,
And distant chimes confessed the city’s crime.

They wrote their stories in the blood of kings,
Convinced their iron edicts would never bend.
Yet rot endures, and darkness softly clings
To every golden era’s bitter end.

I learned to smile beneath a falling sky,
To raise a glass where empires fade to dust.
We danced on graves, our laughter cracked and wry,
As man’s folly decayed to regret and rust.

A thousand ghostly voices whisper in night’s gust—
Confessions, sins, and secrets no daylight could unfold.
We trade our innocence and lives for brittle trust,
And find the future tarnished, spent, and cold.

Fires flicker in forsaken halls,
Where paintings fade to shadows on the wall.
The banquet’s over; velvet silence falls—
A requiem for dreams too faint to recall.

But in the mirror, shadows twist and grin,
Reminding me the fault was always mine.
We built these walls to cage the dark within,
And crowned it progress—an elegant decline.

So let the ruins sing their lullaby,
A dirge for all the empires we became.
We sift through ashes, searching for why—
And find our shadows reveling in the flame.