The citizens speak only in recordings

The skyline is of cell phones

And stories of dazzling digits climb

To blinking messages for aircraft overhead….

In its libraries history ripples down workstation screens

You can read it reflected in the polished marble floors

The letters float over swirls and loops of caramel veins

For a moment near dawn time reverses

Families begin to touch each other in desktop photographs

Children wander from the frame

You see a gray field and a leg

But once the system has been backed up

Martial law resumes:

A dust cloud rolls through the streets

At the top of a flagpole a rope is clanging

Soon accounts are filling, shares change hands

And transaction logs archive on terminals

Left to right like an antic figure fleeing down a flight

Of stairs continually flattening then duplicating

So the bottom is never reached

And margins are achieved not by greed but by devotion

High up in its offices raindrops cling to the window like fingertips